With the Outing Club

THE 27TH Annual Winter Carnival was from many standpoints the most successful ever sponsored by the Outing Club. As a ski meet it lacked the smoothness of other years, but for actual interest and for the increased participation by spectators, it was unparalleled.

When the Carnival crowds left Hanover Sunday afternoon forty undergraduates and faculty gathered in the D. O. C. House for a buffet supper and the traditional "grief meeting" held when everyone is in an unusually critical mood to get at the root of any faults that might have been noticed in the program. Carnival was torn apart until 1 a.m. in a discussion that embraced everything from the girls' ski race to the competitors' banquet on Saturday night.

The girls' ski race was a feature that again proved a main attraction, and turned out to be a real competition. In line with the Carnival trend toward greater participation by undergraduates and guests, there is a definite feeling that some new method of choosing the Carnival Queen might be introduced in the near future. It has been suggested that she be selected from the entries in the girls' race. The function of a Queen is theoretically to reflect the spirit of Carnival, and such being the case, pulchritude should not be the only criterion. A girl who looks well in a ski suit and can do a stem turn might more nearly approximate the Dartmouth ideal. Incidentally, the appearance of the girl competitors this year would indicate that there would be no drop in the standards of queenly pulchritude.

An indication of the attention Carnival has attracted in the outside world is shown by the 23 newspaper men who were in town during the week-end as well as two dozen photographers. In view of the wide- spread interest in winter sports and the difficulty the layman has in understanding the scoring, "Whitey" Fuller, ex-sports editor of The Dartmouth has urged a simplified system of point scoring which he insists must be adopted before the sporting public will take an active interest in skiing.

The present system has an exactness which is much to its credit. Taking the winning time as 100, the points earned by the other competitors are computed relatively, regardless of position; that is, if the time of the second man was almost as good as the first, he would get about 99 points. If he was less good he might only get 93 points. It sounds complicated. It IS. even though from a mathematician's stand- point it is nearly perfect. Fuller suggests something simpler, perhaps like the way a cross country race is scored, so that when the point score of a skier is given the result will mean something to the average reader.

The Carnival skiing was immensely improved by foreign experts, primarily Sigmund Ruud and Sverre Kolterud, Norwegian skiers who thrilled the Hanover crowds by jumps of almost fifty meters. Another European luminary in Hanover was Turid Jespersen, outstanding Norwegian woman skier, and the much heralded Swiss team. Intercollegiate competition was restricted to those with a previous competitive record, thus eliminating much deadwood and raising the general standard.

The Swiss came to Hanover after a large press build-up and offered just the competition needed to make the Carnival ski meet a real three-cornered fight, with McGill edging them out for second place. They have been staying in Hanover as guests of the Hanover Inn, entering meets in the vicinity before leaving for competitions in Canada.

A feature of the Carnival slalom was the experimental Western Union timing device, registering accurate times to the hundredth of a second. It has been used subsequently on Oak Hill with consider- able success. The skier closes a circuit when he passes through a gate at the start, and stops the mechanism when he breaks a tape at the finish.

Coach Walter Prager, to reduce the bulk of the ski squad, held elimination trials on Oak Hill and cut the team to an even forty skiers. With the national fame that Dartmouth teams are acquiring it is of particular interest to note that on the entire squad there is only one senior, Harry Cooke, Vermont boy who won the Eastern Third Class downhill championships two years ago. The dearth of upper class material is partly explained by the year lost by Ted Hunter and Warren Chivers when they dropped out for Olympic competition, and partly by the increased influx of high grade freshman skiers.

Of these forty skiers, thirty-seven were booked to see action in seven different meets the week-end after Carnival when rain caused most of the events to be cancelled. The number of ski meets and the increasing number of Dartmouth skiers wanting to enter gives rise to an acute problem of finding sufficient transportation to meet each Saturday and Sunday.

The D. O. C. constitution, which has taken form during the winter, will come up for intensive discussion the next few weeks when all Outing Club members are urged to attend hearings on various sections. Designed to include in the Outing Club men interested in only one or more phases of club activity, the Constitution will try to abolish the tradition whereby a student has to be exceedingly well- rounded, often at the expense of his use- fulness to the club, in order to be considered for Cabin and Trail.

QUEEN OF THE SNOWS Miss Florence Allen of Birmingham, Ala.,reigned over Dartmouth's 27th WinterCarnival following her selection as Queenof the Snows at Outdoor Evening.