Hosting this year’s Cardboard Campout almost a month earlier than usual proved to be an effective way for Dixie State College students to elude soggy sleeping conditions.
The event got off to a slow start with mostly members of the Dixie State College Student Association in attendance, but as the night continued, the crowd grew to include a little more than 100 students.
The Cardboard Campout is hosted to raise awareness of those less fortunate than ourselves. Students bring cardboard and blankets, and are able to build forts to sleep in on the Encampment Mall at the school.
“I’m just so glad that people came and got along and had a good time,” said DSCSA service chair Jordyn Hanevold, a junior elementary education major from Logandale, Nev. “There could have been more people of course, but overall we are really happy with how everything turned out.”
The structures ranged from simple one-room huts to large fortresses. Some had doors, some were without roofs, but everything was made of cardboard. One group of boys, determined to have the tallest cardboard structure, stacked boxes so high that they had to sit on each others’ shoulders to add tape to some of the layers.
“We had a bunch of cardboard at home and heard about the campout and decided to put it to good use,” said R.J. Smith, a sophomore general education major from St. George. “We came here and put our creative powers together and created our tower and named it ‘The Dubai’ because it’s the tallest structure here.”
Students spent the evening building, listening to music and doing a variety of activities like football and slacklining to entertain themselves. Some students even learned how to use a human slingshot.
The DSCSA collected about 70 cans of food to donate to the Utah Food Bank. Hanevold said this wasn’t as much as they were hoping for, but they were still pleased with what was collected.
The lights went out around midnight, but students were up chatting and playing games in their cardboard huts well into the wee hours. The DSCSA had to wake everyone in attendance at 6 a.m. to make sure the Encampment Mall was clean and cleared before city soccer teams showed up to play.
Students tore down their houses to blaring music as the sun came up, and were given muffins and juice before they left the campout.
