A College tradition since 1925, the snow sculpture will not return to the Green for this year’s Winter Carnival, director of the Collis Center, which oversees the Winter Carnival committee, Anna Hall said. The decision was reached right after the winter interim. She added that events such as the dogsled race and polar bear plunge are dependent on next week’s weather.
Other events such as music performances and the ice sculpture contest will proceed as planned.
“The main factor obviously was weather — the Green is greener now, there’s not really any snow,” chair of the Winter Carnival Council Harrison Perkins ’18 said. “The second factor was a lack of student support in building the actual sculpture in the past few years.”
H. Pennington Haile ’24 built one of the first snow sculptures — a snow castle in the middle of the Green. Since then, students have created sculptures ranging from a fire-breathing dragon to the Cat in the Hat.
Hall said that warm weather has presented problems with previous sculptures, leading to one case of a sculpture collapsing. Hall was referencing the 1997 sculpture, which was originally designed to represent a knight on a horse. Warm weather caused the sculpture to collapse — it was subsequently transformed into a knight’s funeral.
Past snow sculpture chair and chief architect Benjamin Meigs ’10 said that the lack of snow has been an issue in the past, but could be compensated with snow from outside sources.
“The lack of snow was always a concern, but we always had a plan to deal with it,” he said. “There was never a year where we built the sculpture with 100 percent natural snow.”
Meigs said that he observed a trend of increasing difficulty in finding volunteers for the snow sculpture.
“There has been a fundamental shift in student organizations and what students like to do on campus,” he said. “College has gotten more about pre-professional prep — more about building the resume and less about finding unique experiences. Building something out of snow in middle of campus won’t stick well on your resume.”
Last year’s snow sculpture chair Ben Nelson ’17 said that it was very difficult for him to find people to help him build the sculpture. He said that although organizations like sports teams or P.E. classes contributed to the work, individuals would rarely step up for the job. He said that he spent approximately 80 hours on the project, with a total of about 40 students who helped.
“The majority of campus did not come out to help for the sculpture last year,” he said. “The sculpture is not important enough for the students. Everyone loves seeing it. People loved sliding down it. People love taking pictures of it. People don’t really seem to love building it.”
Nelson said that funding may have been another obstacle, because the snow sculpture was one of the largest expenditures of Winter Carnival.
He added that in the past few years, snow from the skiway was used to build the sculpture, but doing so was expensive.
“This year people decided not to spend so much money on something that people are not interested in,” he said.
Nelson said that without a student thrust for the sculpture, the tradition cannot be maintained.
“It’s a week before Winter Carnival and this is the first time anyone approached me to report on the issue,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like anyone noticed that no one was on the Green building the sculpture, when it is usually a continual process over weeks of active work. It wasn’t on people’s mind.”
Meigs said that he is disappointed by the absence of a snow sculpture and hoped that the administration would take a stronger lead in preserving it.
“What makes the College so great is a combination of individuals and traditions that have driven activity and the culture,” he said. “The loss of tradition and dilution of the Dartmouth experience is unfortunate and I hope that we can turn things around and bring back the College that people love.”
Hall also said the snow sculpture situation is disappointing, but that it does not take away from Winter Carnival as a whole.
“I think that the most important parts of Winter Carnival traditions still remain, and that’s embracing winter, and having Winter Carnival planned by students,” Hall said. “The snow sculpture’s just one part of it, and there’s still a whole schedule of events that the Winter Carnival council’s really excited about.”
