"You have to be intense," Michelanne Shields '08, a skier on the women's alpine team, said. "You really have to be gunning, just really going for it right from the start."
This weekend saw a good deal of that intensity on Dartmouth's ski slopes, with the arrival of the ten other ski teams in the Eastern Intercollegiate Ski Association each seeking victory in Dartmouth's annual Winter Carnival.
Dartmouth ultimately defeated Middlebury College to take the top spot in this weekend's competitions. The University of Vermont, which held its carnival the previous weekend, came in third.
While the term Winter Carnival has become closely associated with the social events surrounding carnival weekend -- namely the parties, performances and snow sculptures which have made it famous -- the celebration has its roots in skiing competitions held throughout the winter months.
Each ski season, six carnival races are held as part of the EISA's carnival circuit. The location of the first two varies from year to year, with this season's held at Bates College and St. Lawrence College last month.
The last four are traditionally held at the University of Vermont, Dartmouth, Williams College and Middlebury College. The Middlebury carnival is the conference's championship race.
"Carnival is just a term for an Eastern ski race," Glenn Randall '09, a member of Dartmouth's men's Nordic ski team, said. He described how colleges in the 1910s and 1920s began to hold small ski races between individuals from different schools.
"Back then, it was mainly at Middlebury, Dartmouth and Williams," he said. "There were winter carnivals at each place, and that was kind of where college skiing started."
The carnival races have grown significantly since then, in terms of both the colleges involved and the number of participants. For example, the men's giant slalom this weekend, one of a series of events for alpine skiers, included nearly 60 competitors from 11 different colleges.
Celebrations of the ski races have grown commensurately with the scale of the races themselves. Like Dartmouth, many schools boast weekend-long festivals which often coincide with their ski competitions, particularly at the colleges that are traditional stops on the carnival circuit.
In past years, Middlebury's carnival weekend has featured student figure skating shows and singing by campus performance groups in conjunction with their ski meets. Williams's carnival includes dinners, fireworks and snow sculptures sponsored by the Williams Outing Club. The centerpiece of Bates's carnival, in a variation on the Occom Pond polar bear swim, is the "Puddle Jump," which comes at the end of a torch relay from the state capital, according to Bates's student newspaper.
While many colleges have their own approaches to carnival and traditional ways of celebrating, Winter Carnival at Dartmouth is perhaps the most well-known and storied incarnation of the event. Not only an iconic tradition for the campus community and Dartmouth alumni, who often return for Winter Carnival, the weekend holds a unique place in carnival culture: It is both the oldest carnival, having run since 1910, and the only one to be immortalized on the silver screen, in the 1939 film "Winter Carnival."
As much as carnival celebrations are a high point in student life at Dartmouth, they are no less important to the ski team, for which the Dartmouth carnival is its only home event.
"Every carnival is exciting, but definitely being at home is special," Shields said. "It's way more fun having a bunch of people that you know that have never seen you ski before come to the mountain and cheer you on."
The homecoming aspect of the races was especially poignant for the Nordic ski team, which in recent years has been unable to compete on its home course at Oak Hill.
"For the entire Nordic team, it's our first Winter Carnival on campus," Randall said. "Nobody in the Eastern circuit has actually raced on these courses in a college race before because we just haven't had enough snow. This is the first time we've been able to ski here in four years," he said.
"It was a great last Winter Carnival for me," Shields said. "My parents were here, and lots of alumni and friends, so it was pretty special."
