What price peace?

The quest for it began on flat ground in Pioneer Park recently, with three women and one 4-year-old girl walking.

In 100-degree-plus heat, things weren't comfy. But the lay of the land was still flat, easy walking.

And they had that "just do it" attitude, while walking from a park parking lot east toward River Road, carrying a gas weed whacker, a can of paint, a garden hand rake and a cooler with water and two beers in it, to celebrate with after they found peace.

However, it didn't take long, a couple of steps after they reached grass, before Leah Mische, 28, of Bismarck, carrying the cooler and trying to herd her daughter, Sonja McCullom, 4, knew this wasn't going to be a picnic.

When she screamed, she knew.

The garter snake she almost stepped on didn't scream back. Both quickly parted ways.

And the women continued.

It was after they crossed River Road and faced what appeared to be an almost-vertical bank to climb that Mische really started to wonder if this idea that her mom, Susan Mitchell - who was carrying the paint - was really a necessary one.

The idea:Find a 15-foot-diameter peace sign made of river rock on the hillside.

Mitchell had seen it before, when she made it.

In 1972, Mitchell, 18, and about nine high school friends, with Vietnam on their minds, and thinking love and peace thoughts, decided to create the sign in a place where everyone would easily see it. Driving by on River Road - which, at that time, was treeless on its east side - they could see it, and it could easily be seen from the air.

"Vietman was pretty fresh in everybody's mind,"Mitchell said.

And now with the war in Iraq going on, it was a good time to try to find it - if they could, if it was there - and restore it, paint it.

Mitchell keeps everything from her past - for example, every single birthday card she has ever received. So, she wanted to find the peace sign because of the memories.

She said the group of friends who made it were seniors, and this would be about the last thing they would do together before scattering - she to California for art school, others to various states. Finding it would bring back a piece of her youth near a place important to her.

In those days, Pioneer Park was a major gathering point for teens and local teen musicians who would set up on the grass and play.

A tree in the park that they had carved their names into had burned to the ground one year. So that was gone. Now, only the peace sign was left, she hoped.

"It's been on my mind for a couple of years," she said. "I just wanted to find it."

She had tried to find it before, with friends, during their 10th school reunion, but didn't. But a couple of years ago, she found a black-and-white photo of the peace sign that gave her landmarks to watch for: a couple of nearby boulders.

Up the hill they climbed, and Mische found it first. And she loved her mom's reaction.

"She was giddy … jumping up and down," Mische said.

The stones were red again - the white paint gone. But they were all in place under tall grass.

The women - Mitchell, Mische and Mitchell's friend, Julie Cryderman, 48 - started renovating.

Sonja McCullom, hot and ready to go home, stood below with questions, the same one, frequently:"Are you done yet?"

Bicyclists passing on the bike path above stared. Something to do with the sudden sight on the hillside of three women, one girl and the sound of a gas weedwacker.

It took about an hour to mow and paint.

"I think it's so cool,"Mitchell said about the peace sign.

But they weren't.

Mitchell said she saw the sweat running down Cryderman's nose and down her chin.

The job done, they didn't tarry. They ended up, soon after, with all their clothes on in the Missouri River to cool down.

Steve Neu, director of Bismarck Parks & Recreation District, said that area is park land. He said people would be surprised how many monuments and memorials can be found throughout the park district.

He doesn't want to encourage such things. But he said park staff won't disturb the peace sign.

"This meant something to a number of people," he said.

(Reach reporter Virginia Grantier at 250-8254 or at virginia.grantier@;bismarcktribune.com.)