Naval Academy plebes end their first year with daunting traditional climb of Herndon Monument

First-year students at the U.S. Naval Academy are taking part in the annual Herndon Monument Climb on Wednesday, a ritual that marks the end of their plebe year and some say foreshadows career success.

Members of the Class of 2027 will work together to scale the 21-foot (6-meter) obelisk covered in vegetable shortening to replace a white plebe “Dixie cup” hat with an upperclassman’s hat, according to the Naval Academy. There are about 1,300 plebes in the class, according to academy spokesperson Elizabeth B. Wrightson. After the climb is complete, they’re called fourth class midshipmen, not plebes.

It's said that the person who gets the hat to the top of the monument will be the first admiral in the class.

The climb began in 1940 and the placement of an officer’s cap atop the obelisk to show they had conquered the plebe year came seven years later, according to a history of the event by James Cheevers, the former senior curator at the U.S. Naval Academy Museum. Upperclassmen first smeared grease on the monument to increase the difficulty of the climb in 1949. They first put the Dixie cup hat atop the monument before the climb in 1962.

Records of how long it took each class to scale the monument aren’t complete, but the shortest time is believed to be 1 minute and 30 seconds in 1969, a year that the monument wasn’t greased. The longest was more than four hours in 1995, a year when upperclassmen glued down the Dixie cup.