Sentinel Peak: The A on the Mountain

That white letter A on the dark basalt hill to your east is one of southern Arizona's most recognizable landmarks, but the peak has a history that runs much deeper than college football. Bedrock hollows on the peak, called bedrock mortars, were likely used to grind corn and mesquite beans, and farmers worked the land at its foot for nearly four thousand years. The O'odham people called this area Schuk-Shon, meaning "at the foot of the black mountain," a name that Spanish ears eventually compressed into "Tucson."

After the Presidio of San Agustin del Tucson was built in seventeen seventy-five, Spanish sentinels were posted on this peak to watch for Apache raiding parties coming down from the north, giving it the name Sentinel Peak. By eighteen eighty-three only ruins of that lookout remained, including a circular boulder wall about three feet thick. The A itself was finished in nineteen sixteen, built by University of Arizona students after a football victory over Pomona College.

That game was a seven to six win in nineteen fourteen, and a civil engineering student talked a professor into making the letter a class project. The finished letter stands one hundred sixty feet tall and seventy feet wide at the base, built from whitewashed rocks. It has traditionally been whitewashed by freshmen and has become an informal symbol of Tucson as much as of the university.