Stand at the vertex, where the two walls meet and the granite is tallest, and for a moment look at the polish rather than the letters. You're in the stone, faint, standing behind the names — that's not an accident, the surface was cut and finished to do exactly that. She drew it as a student at Yale, for a class, and she'd been born in Ohio in 1959, so do the arithmetic on how young that is.
The competition drew 1,421 entries, all judged blind, numbers only; nobody on the panel knew her age until afterwards. She was twenty-one when the envelope was opened in 1981.
Fabien, the things people leave at the base get collected and catalogued rather than swept away — boots, letters, a can of beer, a birthday card. Historians of religion have a tired old word for that, votive: you bring an object to a place because the place will hold it better than you can. Nobody planned for it there; it just started.