CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WINNERS!!!
Men’s 1st place: Paul Smiths, Women’s 1st place: Colby, Jack and Jill 1st place: UMO. And congrats to the overall winner, Colby Women!
*ALERT (Updated 19 April): Canoeing events have been changed to the Dartmouth Organic Farm. It is 0.5 miles south from Wilson’s Landing. There is a complex of a few white buildings on the Connecticut River side of the road. Park there and walk down to the canoeing area. *
The Cabin and Trail Division of the Dartmouth Outing Club (DOC) presents the Sixty-First Annual Woodsmen’s Weekend!
The competition will be held on Friday and Saturday, the 20th and 21st of April, 2007. Canoeing events have changed location due to ice on Storrs Pond. Canoeing will now be held at Wilson’s Landing at the Fullington Farm (see the location page). Friday afternoon events will still be held at Oak Hill. Saturday’s events will be held on the Hanover Green.
We will have a hearty raffle this year, and have great t-shirts for sale as well. A friendly person will be selling them both 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.
