More than a century ago, a group of Brigham Young University students stood shoulder to shoulder on a steep Provo hillside, passing buckets of lime, sand and rocks up a human chain.
After hours and hours of work, a single letter, Y, had taken shape, one that would come to represent an entire university.
The Birth of the Y
The Y first appeared on the mountainside in 1906, after BYU President George H. Brimhall commissioned Ernest D. Partridge and three students to oversee the making of three large letters: a B, Y and U for the school.
The plan was ambitious. Students lined the slope, standing eight feet apart, to shuttle materials up the mountain. The work was so strenuous that, by the end, only the Y was completed.
Over the next few years, students strengthened the emblem to keep it from eroding. In 1907, they added a layer of rock. In 1908, they built a three-foot cement rim using 20,000 pounds of sand and cement. By 1911, they added the blocks, or serifs, that give the Y its current form.
A Day of Service and Spirit
By the 1920s, maintaining the Y had become a full-blown campus tradition known as Y Day. Each spring, students, faculty and alumni gathered early in the morning to whitewash the mountainside letter.
Faculty cleared the trail, freshmen hauled water from a spring, sophomores carried the whitewash and upperclassmen poured it. The job required 500 pounds of salt, 110 bags of lime and 3,000 gallons of water.
“By the time they got started, it was nine o’clock in the morning,” Gordon Danes, a BYU archivist, said. “They set up a line up the mountain, eight to ten feet apart, and handed bags of lime and sand from the bottom to the top. Some missed their lunches, and a few students even fainted.”
Muriel Thole, a member of the class of 1958, said the effort united the campus.
“You could see this long line of students going up there and the buckets being passed from one to the other,” she said. “It was something that I think everybody looked to all year long.”
The whitewashing continued until the mid-1970s, when helicopters began hauling paint to reduce trail damage. A few years later, the university coated the Y with a sand-and-cement mixture called gunnite, making yearly maintenance unnecessary.
Today, it’s repainted every few years, a three-person job that takes about two days to apply 200 gallons of paint.
Lighting the Y
In 1924, another tradition began: lighting the Y. Hundreds of students hiked the trail carrying oil-soaked bundles of mattress stuffing, which they placed along the perimeter of the letter and ignited. The result was a fiery display across the night sky, though it only lasted about 20 minutes.
Over time, the university replaced the flames with electric lights strung along the mountain. In the late 1970s and ’80s, strings of bulbs became the norm, and after BYU purchased the property from the U.S. Forest Service in 2016, permanent lighting was installed.
A New Generation of Climbers
For many BYU students, climbing the Y is part of becoming a true cougar. Claire Hebertson, a BYU senior, has made the climb up the Y more than 28 times.
“I was getting my friends to do it with me,” she said. “I was posting about it every day. It just turned into a fun thing to talk about with my friends.”
Hebertson's record time is 25 minutes and 44 seconds.
“It’s close, I know exactly how long it’s going to take and it’s a challenge,” she said.
Her advice is to climb either early in the morning or in the evening, near sunset, so the heat doesn’t add difficulty to the already steep ascent.
“Switchback number 11 is the worst one,” she said.
The Climb Continues
This year’s Hike & Light the Y on Oct.14 will continue the century-old tradition. The first 1,250 participants will receive commemorative flashlights, with donuts and water waiting at the base.
Free shuttles will run from 5–6:30 p.m. from the Wilkinson Student Center to the trailhead.
The methods have changed, from torches to flashlights, buckets to helicopters, but the meaning remains. The Y still shines as a reminder of connection, effort and belonging, lighting the way for every new generation of Cougars.
