“There are two ways to approach a trip like FATAWE,” he said. “One, you can have it be very decentralized, hoping that everything will work out or two, you can try to provide high-level coordination such as helping with logistics, gear rental and providing information on how to be safe. In both cases, people are responsible for themselves, but in the latter case, they will be better prepared.”

While the brunt of the work lay on Michalow, trip coordinators, in charge of groups of three or four people, drew up route plans and took care of food.

Michalow said that he organized 13 separate trips, all of which were staggered throughout the weekend and assigned according to factors such as difficulty level as well as personal preferences.

Michalow mentioned that the trip has spawned everything from the Pat Kelly and Lucas Laursen FATAWE band to a mascot, the jackalope—a “mythical horned rabbit.”  

“Twice now, Dan and I have dressed up as jackalopes and gone to FOP-leader dinners in Quincy,” Kathleen E. McKee ’06, a FOP leader and the FATAWE enthusiast behind the jackalope’s inclusion as the official mascot, wrote in an e-mail. “We wore home-made paper bag masks on our heads that looked like our mascot bunny with horns. Needless to say, mostly people just looked as us very weirdly.”

But perhaps the application to participate in the trip best captures the spirit of FATAWE, facetiously asking students if they’ve defecated in the woods before and to describe the experience, and crediting Confucius with a proverb such as “FATAWE is a team expedition. There is no “I” in FATAWE.”  

Michalow joked in an e-mail that the correct acronym for FATAWE is instead fAtAwe (“The A’s are mountains,” he wrote).

To cover costs, Michalow secured a $320 grant from the Undergraduate Council and finagled rentals from MIT, the University of New Hampshire and Dartmouth, as well as the Square’s own Eastern Mountain Sports, which he said gave the students around 80 percent off of gear rentals.

He estimated that expenses of the basic equipment and base camp costs clocked in around $500.

Though he ran base camp, Michalow described the conditions as tough, equipping participants with gear such as snow shoes and crampons.

“Above 3,000 feet, the trail became a combination of deep, soft snow and ice. Many of the trips reported that they were going half-a-mile per hour in parts,” Michalow said.

Describing the expedition as an “unqualified success” and noting that participants left injury-free, Michalow said that he hopes organized expeditions like FATAWE will continue.

“As for next year, I hope people do an expedition in the same spirit, but it needn’t be the same routes or the same time. Maybe do all the Himalayas or something...” he said.

—Staff writer Margaret W. Ho can be reached at mwho@fas.harvard.edu.