Y Mountain, and the letter above the city

About 1.1 miles each way from the parking lot to the letter, with roughly 1,050 feet of gain, which most people cover in forty five minutes to an hour going up and rather less coming down. It is a short trail with a serious gradient rather than a long easy one, and the second half is materially harder than the first because the shade runs out and the turns get shorter. The full Y Mountain trail continues well above the letter and is a different undertaking.

It measures 380 feet tall by 130 feet wide, which makes it larger than any individual letter of the Hollywood Sign. It was poured on a single day in April 1906 by a human chain of students and faculty passing buckets of lime, sand and rock up the slope, given a layer of rock in 1907, and finished with a three foot concrete wall around it in 1908 using twenty thousand pounds of concrete carried up the same way.

Because they ran out of daylight. The plan in April 1906 was to lay three letters on the hillside, and the work party started with the middle one. After six hours of passing buckets up a mountain by hand they had completed that one letter and nothing else, so the other two were postponed. They were later canceled outright, and the single letter has been there ever since.

Yes, including the parking. There is no fee to walk the trail and no charge on the lots that serve it. What there is instead is a set of rules that come with institutional rather than municipal ownership: no alcohol, drugs, fireworks, fires or weapons anywhere on the property, no demonstrations, and parking lots that open at four in the morning and are gated at ten at night.

Brigham Young University owns the trail, the letter and roughly 81 acres around them. The purchase followed legislation passed by Congress in December 2014 requiring the conveyance from the Forest Service, and the university announced the completed acquisition in 2016. That ownership is why the trail is benched and graded to a standard the surrounding national forest paths are not, and why the parking hours and the conduct rules are the university's.

Yes. There is no seasonal closure and the parking lots keep the same hours all year. What changes is the surface: snow at the top, ice on the shaded lower turns and a hard packed crust on the exposed sections from about December to March. The climb is manageable in those conditions with traction devices on your boots. The descent on ice, on a loose steep trail, is the part that ends badly for people who came without them.

The lots open at four in the morning and are secured by a gate at ten at night. The trail itself is normally open to foot traffic around the clock, so the gate rather than the trail is the constraint on an evening walk. The four in the morning opening exists because sunrise is by a wide margin the busiest hour on this trail, and the ten at night closure catches people who worked backwards from sunset instead of from the gate.

No, none, at any point on it. The slope faces roughly west, it holds the afternoon sun, and above the first few switchbacks there is almost no shade either. In July and August that combination is the single most common reason people get into difficulty on a trail barely a mile long. Carry more water than the distance suggests, and start before seven in the morning if the forecast is over ninety.

No. The letter sits partway up the face and the Y Mountain trail continues well above it onto rougher, unimproved ground with substantially more climbing. Almost everybody who starts up this trail is going to the letter, and treating the letter as the destination is the correct decision in ordinary footwear with the water most people carry. Going higher is a planned day rather than an extension of an hour's walk.