The Cabin and Trail Division of the Dartmouth Outing Club (DOC) presents the Sixty-Third Annual Woodsmen’s Weekend!The competition will be held on Friday and Saturday, the 24th and 25th of April, 2009. Tentatively, Friday afternoon events will be held at Oak Hill. Saturday’s events will be held on the Hanover Green.
This year the competition will have Men’s, Women’s, Jack&Jill, Alumni and Alumni-Over-50 divisions.
We will have a hearty raffle this year, and have some great t-shirts for sale as well. Raffle tickets and t-shirts will be available for sale on the Green on Saturday.
This weekend’s event began as talk among John Rand, Director of the Dartmouth Outing Club, Bill Robes of Kimball Union Academy, and Ross McKenney, the DOC’s Woodcraft Advisor, about the unwillingness of students in the DOC to tackle primitive camping trips, because they did not have the skills to survive in the woods. Robes thought of turning such skills into an informal competition between schools. McKenney, as a woodsman of some fifty years’ standing and former sportsman show competitor, had the tools for the job. As a result, the first Woodsmen’s Weekend was held in May 1947 at Storrs Pond between the DOC, Kimball Union, and Williams College.
The annual meet grew rapidly in significance and excitement. Paul Smith’s College joined the event in 1949 and the University of Maine that same year, and under the leadership of Gould Hoyt the PSC teams won for nine straight years from 1958-1966, while Maine dominated the contest in the early ’70s. With Ross’s retirement in 1959 the Dartmouth team languished without significant coaching for much of the ’60s.
