Western State College's "W" on Tenderfoot Mountain became a major college tradition, lighted each year at Homecoming, often on July 4th, and on other special occasions when students ignited oil-soaked rags outlining its legs, and for many years students and faculty renewed its whitewash by passing buckets of lime and water from fires that melted the snow while official splashers applied the whitewash to the rocks; later, tank trucks hauled water to the top of the mountain and hydrated lime was distributed through fire hoses. Inspired by Dr. John C. Johnson, one of the college's first graduates who later became a biology professor, chairman of the Division of Natural Science and Mathematics at WSC, and founder of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory at Gothic, the "W" was laid out on March 30, 1923, by Johnson and four students using bed sheets borrowed from home. On May 2, 1923, after WSC President Samuel Quigley declared a holiday, most students and faculty climbed the mountain to build it, with freshmen carrying a ton of lime in 100-pound sacks, upperclassmen and faculty gathering dead trees for fires to melt the snow, and the group carrying hundreds of heavy flat rocks into the outlined borders. Measuring 420 feet long and 320 feet wide, with legs 16 feet thick and a total area of 25,560 square feet, it became the world's largest such letter and the world's largest collegiate emblem.