❄️ Created in 1910 at the suggestion of Dartmouth Outing Club founder Fred Harris, what began as the “first field day of the Outing Club” has grown into one of Dartmouth’s most cherished traditions—and one of the oldest collegiate winter festivals in America. National Geographic once called it “the Mardi Gras of the North.”
The first carnival consisted of snowshoeing, skiing, and a ski jump. Those early competitions eventually evolved into the national ski racing leagues, meaning Dartmouth helped found intercollegiate skiing as we know it today. Over the decades, the event grew to include ice sculptures, a Polar Bear Swim, themed festivities, and plenty of campus-wide revelry.
It even has a Hollywood footnote: F. Scott Fitzgerald traveled to Hanover in 1939 to write the screenplay for the film Winter Carnival— though he drank so heavily during the trip that he was fired from the project. 🎥
The 116th Winter Carnival took place in February 2026, themed “The Blizzard of Oz: Wicked Cold.” Over a century in, it remains one of those rare college traditions that has genuinely earned its own mythology.
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