This article is featured in the 2026 Winter Carnival Issue.
Winter Carnival has always rested on an assumption so basic it rarely needed articulation: Winter will be here. It will be cold enough, snowy enough and reliable enough to plan around, celebrate and take for granted. For more than a century, Dartmouth students have organized a weekend in February around the idea that winter is not only inevitable but central, a defining feature of life in Hanover and of the College’s identity itself.
That assumption may be true this year, but no longer holds with the same confidence year in and year out.
Climate change has not announced itself at Dartmouth through a single dramatic rupture. Instead, it appears in quieter disruptions that are now familiar.
Last fall, Homecoming bonfire, a ritual that once felt as guaranteed as the season itself, was canceled because of a New Hampshire statewide burn ban amid severe drought, prompting the College to replace it with a light and laser show on the Green.
The year before last, the Polar Bear Plunge — an iconic Winter Carnival staple — was called off because the ice was too thin, one of two instances in the past six years that weather concerns forced cancellation.
Last spring, Green Key, Dartmouth’s spring celebration, which usually evokes sunshine and campus celebration, saw torrential rain that turned large portions of the campus into mud and required adaptive planning; while rain itself is part of spring, the heavy weather became a notable aspect of the weekend’s experience.
None of these moments marked the end of tradition. But together, they suggest a shift. The seasons still come, but no longer on predictable terms. Events once built around assumed conditions — frozen water, dependable snow cover, clear distinctions between winter and spring — now require contingency plans and creative recalibration.
That uncertainty may reshape the meaning of a celebration like Winter Carnival, but it will not make it obsolete, nor does it drain it of joy. If anything, it demands more from it.
Traditions draw their power not from permanence but from repetition under changing conditions. Winter Carnival has already survived enormous historical transformations, including war, coeducation, institutional reform and pandemic. Climate change introduces a different kind of pressure, one that is neither purely cultural nor administrative but physical. It asks whether winter itself can still be assumed.
There is a temptation to frame this shift as loss, to mourn what has become unreliable. But that framing misses something essential. Meaning does not disappear when certainty does. It changes. It raises different questions than it once did. What does it mean to love a season that is fragile? How do traditions adapt when the environment that shaped them is changing? What responsibility accompanies celebration?
These are not questions demanding moralizing answers. They require seriousness, the kind Dartmouth has long claimed as part of its intellectual character. Winter Carnival, at its best, has never been only about spectacle. It has been about community and a shared relationship to place. Climate change sharpens those values rather than negating them.
To celebrate winter now is to acknowledge that it is not infinite. To plan Winter Carnival is to accept that tradition is not static. And to continue gathering — skiing, skating, performing, building — in February is not an act of denial, but of recognition: that some things are worth holding carefully, even when they are no longer assured.
Winter Carnival still does, and still will, make sense, despite the changing assumptions. But soon it may no longer be exactly as it was. And that change, uncomfortable as it may be, does not have to mean a loss of tradition. It is an invitation to engage with it more deliberately.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
