Students Seek to Break World Records at Carnival

Michigan Tech’s Winter Carnival has long been famous for elaborate sculptures crafted from snow and ice. This year, students are putting the university’s copious snowfall to a different use.

In a single day, they hope to break the world records for the largest snowball, the biggest snowball fight, and the highest number of snow angels made in a single event.

It all happens on Friday, Feb. 10. Michigan Tech students will roll up a six-foot snowball in the morning. Then, in the afternoon, they are inviting the general public, including area schoolchildren in grades 4 and up, to come to Sherman Field, the university’s football stadium. They will line up in two teams for the snowball fight and then drop to the ground and make snow angels.

Students have contacted Guinness World Records and are working to get their anticipated three-record feat included in its roster. A crowd of more than 3,100 will be needed for the snowball fight and the group snow-angel fest. Everyone is invited to participate. Registration is set for noon-12:45 p.m. at Sherman Field, with the snowball fight and snow-angel event scheduled for 1 p.m. For more information, contact Travis Pierce, 906-487-3056, tlpierce@mtu.edu

Winter Carnival Kicks Off Feb. 8

For nearly two weeks, Michigan Tech students have been laboring day and night building the ornate snow statues that are Winter Carnival’s show-stoppers. They’ll put in a final marathon effort throughout the night of Wednesday, Feb. 8, finishing for 8 a.m. judging on Feb. 9.

The thousands of visitors coming to view the statues should expect whimsy; this year’s theme is “Cartoon Art for the Young at Heart.”

Carnival, sponsored by the Blue Key National Honor Society, also features a queen contest, skits, ice bowling (in which students are both the bowlers and the bowling ball) and broomball, in which teams of students play a variant of hockey wearing shoes instead of skates and using brooms instead of sticks.

For more information, visit https://www.mtu.edu/carnival/ . Photos of last year’s snow statues are available at https://www.mtu.edu/carnival/2005/statues.html

Michigan Technological University is a public research university founded in 1885 in Houghton, Michigan, and is home to more than 7,000 students from 55 countries around the world. Consistently ranked among the best universities in the country for return on investment, Michigan’s flagship technological university offers more than 120 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology, engineering, computing, forestry, business and economics, health professions, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, and the arts. The rural campus is situated just miles from Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, offering year-round opportunities for outdoor adventure.