Salida's Tenderfoot 'S' and the Christmas Mountain tree

Look north up F Street in downtown Salida and the view ends at a mountain wearing a letter. The slope is Tenderfoot, and the lighted “S” near its top has watched over town since Salida High School students first laid out the letter in 1926. Locals tend it the way you’d tend a porch light. Some nights the “S” glows; other nights it shifts to a red heart, a nod to Salida’s old nickname, the Heart of the Rockies.

The mountain has a second life every winter. Since 1989, volunteers have spent the cold weeks of fall hiking that steep, gully-cut face to string lights into the outline of an enormous Christmas tree, ornaments and a star included. On the night after Thanksgiving the switch flips and the whole hillside becomes a 750-foot tree above the rooftops. Boosters call it the tallest in the country; whether or not anyone has formally certified that, it is a genuinely tall tree on a genuinely steep mountain, now lit with LEDs that hold up better against the wind and snow up top.

It is the kind of landmark a town builds by hand, one season at a time. For lighting dates and the fuller story, the Ark Valley Voice history is a good place to start.