She shines a bright light on Tulsa’s most creative and most grotesque: the blonde woman in a lobster suit, the man test driving the sunglasses/white necktie/short-shorts combo, the heroes who wear merely their Speedos. One resident prefers to call her the “Hill of Half-Naked Women.”

Almost a decade old now, our Vesuvius knows to alert the neighbors and the masses of her eruption. The warnings appear in the days before she rumbles, in neon orange paint as the hill ascends, in the form of her credo and her common name:

Mind the Gap. Mind the Gap. Cry Baby Hill.

She is growling again this weekend, perhaps for a crowd larger than she has ever seen. Word continues to spread that Cry Baby Hill is the party of the year in Tulsa, and maybe even the party of the year in cycling in the United States.

But as Cry Baby Hill once again welcomes swaths of cycling fans and people looking for a good time on Sunday at the final leg of the three-day, Tulsa Tough bike race, it’s important to revisit the hill’s roots. Cry Baby Hill’s birth into the party it is today was gloriously organic and depravedly outrageous.