Thaw Abiding | The Dartmouth Winter Carnival in Hanover, New Hampshire

A young bullhorn-wielding pirate stands in melting trucked-in snow while two dozen college students, some wearing capes or tutus, position plastic sleds for a human dogsled race. The pirate warms up the small crowd of spectators (What’s a pirate’s favorite food? BAAAAAR-B-Q!), and then the contest begins. Ready … set … false start. A husky breaks free from its owner and charges down the course. It clearly knows its place in this thing.

Dartmouth Winter Carnival! The storied frosted-Ivy bacchanal that in its 113 years of February fests has boasted a Guinness-record snow sculpture, beer-barrel jumping by fraternity-hardened skaters, a formal ball and a beauty contest with women bused in from all over New England, and a 1939 major motion picture partially written by F. Scott Fitzgerald!

It took young people to come up with the radical and unnatural notion that humans need not spend the winter in hibernation. Established in 1910 by a Dartmouth senior, the festival turned the bitter cold and deep snows of northern New England into good, if not entirely sober, fun.

While this storied college in Hanover, New Hampshire, wasn’t the first to invent the winter carnival tradition—the Vermont city of Burlington, for one, launched its snowy celebration in 1886—Dartmouth’s mix of snow sculptures, daring feats, and red-cheeked young people soon made it the platonic ideal. Over the years, students added a growing mix of competitive outdoor sporting events, from skijoring (being pulled on skis behind horses) to ice sculpting. Colleges and towns throughout New England soon followed with their own carnivals.

Given the normal student’s collegiate span of four years, any ritual older than five is necessarily an eternal tradition. And no school has owned tradition more than Dartmouth, whose college song warns students to “set a watch/ Lest the old traditions fail!” Yet, Mother Nature may be proving stronger than Alma Mater. The 2023 carnival featured freakishly warm temperatures and bright sunshine, making the Caribbean-pirate theme (“Winter CAAARRRnival: Shiver Me Timbers”) eerily appropriate.

On Saturday afternoon, the fest’s third day, students had just begun work sculpting a rapidly melting eight-foot pile of snow. Across the street, elaborately carved ice sculptures stood shielded from the sun by insulation. There was no barrel jumping (too alcoholic) and no beauty pageant (too pre-coeducation). The organizers of the annual Polar Bear Swim had no need to chop through the ice in the campus pond, seeing as how there was no ice. “Personally,” a student dressed as a cartoon bear confided in the student paper, “I just call it ‘the swim.’” Fraternities participated in a decidedly torrid fashion: Alpha Chi held an annual beach party; Phi Delt, a chili cook-off.

That same weekend, though, Dartmouth’s Big Green downhill and Nordic ski teams confirmed the school’s winter-sports reputation by winning the carnival title at New Hampshire’s Waterville Valley. Except that it wasn’t Dartmouth’s carnival. It was Harvard’s, scheduled at the same time.

Falling student enthusiasm has accompanied rising temperatures. Graduating seniors last year ranked Winter Carnival last among the five traditional key events at Dartmouth; first-year fall hiking trips and homecoming got the highest marks.

Well, so what? We visitors can hold our own private carnival. When there’s snow, we can snowshoe on the Appalachian Trail right from the campus. The college now provides artificial snow on Hanover’s groomed Oak Hill cross-country ski area and on Dartmouth’s own Skiway. And we can even dance in the little nightclub installed under the Still North bookshop off Main Street.

As for that human dogsled race, the early rounds revealed more enthusiasm than skill. Giggling bodies littered the snow over the 50-yard course, and more than one cellphone had to be retrieved from clueless pockets. Onlookers agreed that the winner was the husky.

Dartmouth students say they dwell more on their studies than on beer barrels and sled races these days. They may not be typecast in a major motion picture, but these are exactly the kinds of bright, tutu-clad young people who might someday solve the climate change conundrum. Go Green! Indeed.

For details on the 2024 Dartmouth Winter Carnival and to see photos of past years, go to home.dartmouth.edu/about/winter-carnival.