Platteville M, the world’s biggest, is more than a stunt and a climb

THE WISCO 100: This is the first in a series of reports on 100 outdoor adventures across Wisconsin, spanning every corner of the state and embracing the broadest possible definition of adventure.

No one was higher, as far as the eye could see.

I had just hiked to the top of the Platteville Mound, which offered the vantage of a bird, a view supreme over all the dells and dorms below, all those city streets and rolling country highways, the farms and the fields from Platteville down to the Mississippi River. The mound rises suddenly from the surrounding farmland and peaks at more than 1,400 feet above the level of the closest sea, wherever that may be. It’s higher than most of the hills in southwest Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, but elevation wasn’t my motive for this adventure.

The mound’s primary significance is alphabetical. Looking down, a giant “M” was whitewashed onto the rocky slope below my feet.

For local residents, and perhaps for many beyond, that bold, hillside letter overlooking the city is understood proudly to be “The World’s Largest M,” a century-old project.

Its height, 241 feet. Its width, 214. Take that, Colorado!

But the Platteville M means more to this community than bragging rights or a factoid in the record books. The M is a topographical wonder and a geographical marker, sometimes a destination, more often a point of orientation seen from miles away. Its modestly serif font looms ever-present in the background of daily life in this college town. The UW-Platteville campus has adopted the distant M into its care and incorporates it into some of its celebrations, most notably homecoming week, when a multitude of kerosene lanterns are positioned on the M to set it ablaze. And always, it is a symbol of local identity, something distinctive that Platteville calls its own.

It also is a climb.

There are 290 steps on the wooden staircase to the top. I likely wouldn’t have have summited that staircase on this cold late-November morning if I hadn’t been playfully shamed by a friend into climbing it.

I live in Wauwatosa but have been a regular visitor to Platteville for many years to see Liz’s parents, John and Deb. My in-laws have called the city home most of their lives, since they both attended UW-Platteville themselves and then graduated and decided to stay. As a runner, I’ve spent many hours navigating now-familiar routes around the city on foot, and one of my go-to runs is the 10-mile out-and-back from John and Deb’s house on the north side of town to the Platteville M.

Sometimes when I get to the mound after five miles, I climb it. Most times I don’t. For me, it is an obvious target that gives my long run a nominal purpose. Adding a short climb in the middle of the run doesn’t always seem necessary or productive.

Then a friend of mine, Steve, started commenting on my posts on Strava.

Strava, the athlete-bragging app disguised as an activity tracker. I don’t always have much to brag about, but I can look back at my activities and count 39 in which I have mentioned Platteville since we moved back to Wisconsin in 2013. Of those, 10 have referenced the Platteville M.

“Okay you cannot run to the giant M and then NOT CLIMB IT!” Steve says.

Technically, he is wrong, of course. But I take his point. Why wouldn’t you climb it?

On the other hand, why should I? My mind drifts to larger questions: Like, why would anyone create a giant M on a hillside above Platteville in the first place? The more I thought about it, the less I understood the purpose. And wouldn’t the letter P have been a more logical choice in a city named Platteville?!

Questions like this — including, why run or climb at all — have readymade answers: Because we can, and because it’s there, as Sir Edmund Hillary famously said about the world’s most ridiculously unnecessary Strava activity, climbing Mount Everest. (I suspect he was bragging a bit.)

Why is the Platteville Mound there? The Driftless Area is so named because presumably no glacier dared advance far enough to wipe these hills out. So in a mostly flat state that is now geologically rich in the remnants of ice ages, the Platteville Mound is a relic representing a different force. Permanence.

And as long as my legs could run, they could also climb. During our Thanksgiving visit with John and Deb, I decided to run to the M twice, once for speed (no climb), and on the second run two days later, I paused midway and, goaded by Steve, inserted a .2-mile hike into the thing, being sure to take photographic evidence of the heights of my achievement.

Alone atop the world, I shivered, wide awake in the 14-degree chill and double-digit wind. I stood on the path next to the picnic area above the M and briefly took in the wide expanse of southwestern Wisconsin, barren and brown, as the pale sun fought through wisps of clouds.

Then I snapped my photo. I snapped another. No need to linger. I climbed back down and started running back to Platteville.

A mound no glacier dared wipe out

Imagine you hiked to the top of the Platteville Mound about 20,000 years ago, but instead of looking southwest, as you normally would today, you turned and looked northeast. Less than 50 miles away, whether you could see that far or not, the leading edge of a massive glacier known as the Laurentide Ice Sheet would be lurking, threatening to test the permanence of the Platteville Mound.

Would you be alarmed? Would you flee to Iowa? Would you hold you breath?

No need. The last glacier got no closer to Platteville — whew! — and it left no glacial sediment, or “drift,” as the region’s Driftless label signifies.

What did the receding Laurentide glacier leave untouched? UW-Platteville provides the tale of the tape on the webpage it devotes to the cherished hill: What remained was a conspicuous knob about mile long and a half-mile wide, about 150 feet tall from its base, rising about 400 feet above the city that now shares its name.

The geological name for such a mound is monadnock, or inselberg. Such a hill “stands above the surrounding plain on account of the resistance of the rock of which it is composed,” according to the Wisconsin DNR. In other words, when rain and river eroded everything around it, the stronger rock of the Platteville Mound was left standing.

Other Wisconsin monadnocks include Belmont Mound a few miles east and the twin Blue Mounds even farther east. Belmont Mound and Blue Mounds would get their own state parks. The Platteville Mound got a giant M.

A giant M? Scratch your head, if you must, but anyone in Platteville could tell you that the M stands for the Wisconsin Mining School, the antecedent of today’s UW-Platteville.

Apparently, hillside letters were a big deal a century ago in towns with mining schools. In December 1924, members of Platteville’s Engineering Club voted to create their own M on the Platteville Mound and assigned a team of investigators to the project. The project was promptly forgotten for more than a decade.

No rush, I guess. The mound wasn’t going anywhere.

Then in late 1936, two mining students hiked out to the mound and stamped an M into the snow on the 45-degree slope. A landmark was born. It isn’t clear what inspired Pat Medley and Alvin Knoerr, but their goal was clear. They wanted their stunt to be visible from afar.

"It took several trips in parallel to widen out the path,” Knoerr told Thomas Lundeen for his history of UW-Platteville. "Shortly before sundown we walked back to Platteville and were happy to note that the 'M' could be discerned at a distance.”

Walking back to Platteville in soggy shoes must have been brutal, but their labor wasn’t in vain. The weather turned cold and froze their footprints on the hill in place for the rest of the winter, and in the spring, fellow students committed to helping recreate the ice M, but more permanently this time, using tons of stones. They wanted their M to best the M created by the Colorado School of Mines, which was 200 feet tall. Mission accomplished.

I dug up Lundeen’s book online to read Knoerr’s full account of the M’s origin. What intrigued me most was the attitude of the students and college administrators. School pride and beating the Coloradans ultimately were less important than the joy of dedicated labor. “We haven’t had a field day in a long time,” the mining school’s director said. “Maybe this would be the time to start one to build an M.”

Does moving stones into the shape of an M actually accomplish anything? Are my 10-mile runs of any great worth? I may be asking the wrong questions.

“The real valuable lesson,” Knoerr told Lundeen, “was the reward that one gets by establishing exceptionally high goals and working energetically, enthusiastically and confidently to achieve them.”

Behind the M’s survival, students and dolomite

That energetic work continues today, thanks to UW-Platteville’s chapter of the Society of Automotive Engineers, or SAE. The chapter’s members whitewash the M every year, so it’s as prominent as it was in Knoerr’s and Medley’s day. They also are responsible for setting up lanterns on the M for homecoming.

“From the bottom, it looks like the whole entire M is on fire,” Cade Klefstad told me when I reached him by phone. Klefstad, the outgoing president of the SAE chapter, graduated in December with a degree in construction management, but he was still eager to talk about the M.

“I’ve spent a lot of time up there,” he said. “It’s pretty enjoyable. To kind of look out, you can see a long ways.”

The 90 acres that include the mound were once privately owned, by William Snow, the man who initially gave the students permission to build the M in the 1930s. After his death, the land became the property of L.R. Clausen, who later donated it to the college. Today, a plaque next to the parking lot at the base of the M identifies the area as Clausen Park, and the mound is owned and managed by the University of Wisconsin System.

Over the years, the M’s renown has been accentuated by certain pop culture moments that incorporated the 13th letter of the alphabet. Imagine the kinds of antics a small city might conceive around that letter. MTV? Yep. In 1987, about 650 students formed a T and a V next to the mound’s M, and they were featured on the cable channel that may or may not still play music.

Mickey Mouse? Yep. About 250 people arranged themselves on the hill to create Mickey ears on the M, paving the way for Mickey’s Hometown Parade to come to Platteville on July 4, 1998.

Most years, however, the activity on the M receives no special spotlight. SAE members trim the brush at the sides of the M, like an annual haircut, so its face remains fully visible. They freshen the M with whitewashing, which is achieved, Klefstad said, using hydrated lime that is mixed in tubs and then sprayed through a hose onto the surface of the letter. That chore takes about 50 volunteers.

Klefstad also was kind enough to track down an answer to one of my nagging questions about the M: What the heck is the mound made of?

He sent me a detailed response from Chris Underwood, an environmental science professor at UW-Platteville. The mound, officially named the Platte Mound, is multiple layers of rock, Underwood said, starting with the most important layer, “the hard capstone of Niagara dolomite,” which formed about 430 million years ago.

“Most of the Niagara dolomite here in southwest Wisconsin has weathered and eroded away,” Underwood wrote. “But some still remains as the capstones of places like the Belmont Mound, the Blue Mounds and the Platte Mound. This hard capstone atop these mounds sheltered the layers of rock below from weathering.”

The mound’s permanence, then, owes everything to that capstone of dolomite.

But Underwood noted that the deeper layers of sedimentary rock and Cambrian sandstone may not be so protected after all. Dolomite weathers very slowly, yes, but its rate of erosion is still more than zero.

“Once the dolomite capstone has heavily weathered, the mound itself will eventually begin to lose elevation,” Underwood said, “as the softer rocks beneath the dolomite become exposed.”

I had been hoping for a symbol of permanence and learned I was standing on a mound of quicksand! OK, maybe not so quick — Underwood says it will take thousands of years for that dolomite to fully erode — but it still points to an eventual end of the Platteville M.

Saying goodbye

“We wanted the M to stand for music, too,” John said.

It was the week of Christmas. Liz, our boys and I were visiting Platteville one more time. After dinner one evening, I had asked John and Deb their memories of the M. Both studied music at UW-Platteville in the early 1970s, and John recalled a kind of rivalry with the college’s engineering students and their annual lighting of the M.

“I don’t know how the engineers light the M, but in my day, the music majors decided that we wanted to light the M,” he said. “So we got a bunch of cans, put a little bit of gasoline in them and a cloth wick, and we hauled them out to the M. People lined them up and lit them.”

The spirit of Knoerr and Medley lived on.

There have been steps to the top for as long as I’ve known the M, but that wasn’t always the case, Deb said. “Before, you had to climb it yourself.”

Deb grew up in Prairie du Chien, and on the drive back to college, she could see the M by Lancaster and knew she was getting closer. From some points, the M was visible from as far away as Iowa.

“The fact that they still maintain it is kind of impressive,” she said.

I’ve known John and Deb nearly as long as I’ve known Liz. If anything should seem permanent, it’s their house on the cul-de-sac in Platteville, their driveway with fresh newspapers at sunrise, the fireplace and mantle in front of which our boys played and posed for photos, the back refrigerator that was always stocked with Potosi Cave Ale, the reclining chairs where John and Deb relaxed in front of the TV, the dining room where we shared so many extended family meals.

The memories are indeed permanent to us, but that week, we were in Platteville to say goodbye. John and Deb had decided it was time to move out of the Platteville house. This month, they relocated to Wauwatosa to be closer to their grandsons.

During our Christmas visit, I spotted a photo of the Platteville M on a bookshelf in John and Deb’s living room. It was as sharp a portrait as any family photo. In another frame on the shelf, to the right of the M portrait, was a photo of a girl I had never known. It was Liz, only a few years old — long before she was 23 and first met me.

And to the M’s left sat another frame containing an image in black and white that seemed to burst its borders because of the smiles on the five faces it contained.

The young man on the farthest right was Jim Bittner. He would become an insurance agent and the one-time mayor of Prairie du Chien, a larger-than-life figure and loving grandfather, from what I’ve heard. He died of cancer at 73, the fall before Liz and I made our fateful introductions. Sadly, he was the only one of Liz’s grandparents I didn’t have the joy of meeting.

Wish as we may for our own capstones of dolomite, we are finite beings. Every one of us.

In the Bittner family photo, Liz’s grandfather, then a tall, brawny and youthful-looking fellow, has locked arms with his mother. They are connected in a chain of hands to his sister and father and brother. Though not in formalwear, they’ve dressed nicely for the occasion and are posing for the photo outdoors, with grass and trees for the background.

The family of five fills the frame, forever frozen in a moment of merriment, and something about the sunshine or the angle of the camera almost makes them appear poised to leap forward towards us, escaping their two-dimensional confines. If only they could.

I didn’t run to the M during that last trip, but on one of our final days in Platteville, I drove out there with our dog, Jeepers. I wanted to inspect the mound a little more thoroughly and give it one more climb. It’s anyone’s guess when we’ll get back there again.

The weather was warmer than for my visit in November, but this time, a low-lying cloud blanketed everything with drizzle and gave the M a ghostly look once you could see it through the fog.

Jeepers and I walked around the base for a bit, then began to ascend the mound, step by step. The staircase has three platforms, where visitors can stop for a look out from ever-increasing elevations. Plaques on the faces of most of the steps are inscribed with dedications to local families and past graduates, many of whom presumably helped maintain the M through the years.

Larry Nelson. Craig and Angela Gasior. Bill Huff, class of 1959. Ted Heiser, from all the way back to the M’s birth, class of 1937. And, above the very first step, Pat Medley and Alvin Knoerr get their due.

At the top, I took passing inventory of the picnic area. Three tables. Some benches. A service road up the other side of the hill. A tall communications tower next to a smaller structure, both surrounded by security fences. And large rocks — the dolomite that is doing its best to weather away only slowly.

A flash of red caught my eye as a cardinal darted from tree to tree. Bluejays pierced the calm with their calls. A pair of downy woodpeckers nibbled at sumac seeds. I paced slowly. Jeepers gave me an occasional look back, probably thinking it strange that I was taking such interest in a scene so ordinary.

The view from the top was limited by the clouds and drizzle. I was focused more on the view at our feet. The brush that the SAE volunteers had cut was already starting to grow back, but we made it to the top of the white M. I spotted both an empty Busch Light can and what appeared to be the scat of a coyote. The Earth’s creatures don’t always clean up after themselves.

The M dominates the landscape from afar. Up close, its dominance diminishes, yet standing on the letter itself felt different. As Deb had said, it was kind of impressive. Whether the M lasts another hundred years or barely another day, it was always worth making the trip. Energetically, enthusiastically and confidently.

And if the Platte Mound were to disappear tomorrow, there will always be other mounds, mountains, trails, rivers and valleys beckoning for new adventures. Jeepers and I said goodbye, for now, and we climbed back down.