On a recent weekend outing with students and teaching assistants from my course “Wilderness and Human Values,” I paused on the trail to the top of Cowles Mountain in San Diego to ask: “I wonder if we’ll be able to see the ‘C’?”
My companions stared at me blankly. “It’s there,” they said, pointing away from the mountain.
No, I corrected, it was in the other direction, and we likely wouldn’t see it.
They corrected me, pointing. “It’s right there.”
There were two errors happening at once in this conversation. The first was that I had confused the “S” on Cowles Mountain with the “C” on a mountain behind the University of California, Riverside. There is no “C” on Cowles Mountain, and the enormous “S” is usually obscured except immediately after a wildfire.
Add to this the fact that my students thought I was referring to “the sea,” which had been out on the horizon for a large part of the hike.
There used to be a “G” on the other side, facing the east, more or less. It was maintained by students from Grossmont High School. Wish I had taken a picture back in the day!