Associated Press/Scott McKiernan

“They should make a movie,” U.S. women’s hockey forward Hilary Knight ’12 (number 21, middle) said, summing up her team’s 3–2 win in a shootout over archrival Canada to win gold at the PyeongChang Olympics in February. Knight was one of four Badgers on the U.S. squad, which included Brianna Decker x’13, Meghan Duggan ’11 (right), and Alex Rigsby ’15. Team Canada had five Badgers: Emily Clark x’18, Ann-Renée Desbiens ’17, Meaghan Mikkelson ’07, Sarah Nurse x’17, and Blayre Turnbull x’15. “We had all the drama,” Knight said. “It’s sort of a storybook ending to an incredible series of accomplishments.”

The St. Patrick’s Day Blizzard

March 17, 1965 Storm total of 6.9 inches

Chancellor Robben Fleming LLB’41 canceled classes, which proved to be prescient when the day’s record-high temperatures caused the snow to turn into freezing rain.

The Inaugural Battle

December 8, 2009 14.1 inches in 48 hours

As snow began to pummel campus the evening prior, students asked Chancellor Carolyn “Biddy” Martin PhD’85 on Twitter if she would cancel classes. At 7:45 p.m. the chancellor tweeted that all classes and operations the next day would be canceled. And at 7:46 p.m., students began planning for the inaugural “Battle for Bascom” snowball fight.

The Battle: Part 2

February 2, 2011 14.3 inches in 48 hours

The 2011 snow day was Martin’s second cancellation in just four semesters. This snow day also secured the Battle for Bascom as an annual campus tradition (see “Five Campus Rivalries”).

The Exam Stopper

December 20, 2012 15.2 inches in 48 hours

The next year, Interim Chancellor David Ward did something no UW chancellor had done before: he canceled all in-person final exams for the Fall 2012 semester.

Editor’s note: This list includes only the days when the university shut down completely — when no classes were held whatsoever. The university has closed early on several other occasions, including December 3, 1990, when classes were canceled around 10:30 a.m. on what turned out to be one of Madison’s snowiest days on record.

Correction: This article originally stated that Chancellor Biddy Martin canceled the in-person final exams in December 2012; it was Interim Chancellor David Ward.

UW-Madison Archives S09929

Benjamin Franklin was right. Taxation is an absolute certainty in life — even life near the South Pole.

Fifty years ago, UW researcher Stephen Den Hartog found himself on the bottom of the world when the time came to fill out his Form 1040 for the IRS. This couldn’t have been a great surprise, because Den Hartog had spent several seasons on the southern continent. Den Hartog Peak (near the Ramsey Glacier) is named in his honor. (Though they shared a family name, it’s unlikely that he claimed the mountain as a dependent.)

The UW knows ice sheets. Several researchers have made names for themselves in the Antarctic, including Charles Bentley, who was part of the team that made the first overland traverse of Western Antarctica in 1957, and in the 2000s, he served as principal investigator on an ice-core project that set the record for the deepest core ever drilled out of a glacier.

The UW continues to have an important presence in Antarctica, and it continues to dig deep holes in the southern ice. The university leads the IceCube Collaboration, which runs a vast observatory set up at the South Pole to detect neutrinos. That detector is made up of 5,160 modules embedded in a cubic kilometer of ice.

In September, IceCube’s principal investigator, UW physics professor Francis Halzen, won a 2015 Balzan Prize for his work in astroparticle physics. (It’s worth 1 million Swiss francs, which will almost certainly have an effect on his taxes.)

Editor’s Note: In the original, print version of this article, the subject of the photo was mis-identified as Charles Bentley. We thank his daughter, Molly Bentley, for catching our error.

Photo: Jeff Miller

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has seen its share of civil wars. During the American Civil War, more than 70,000 soldiers trained in what is now one of the greatest college football stadiums in America — Camp Randall. And then, nearly 150 years later, hoards of students descended upon Bascom Hill for what came to be called the Battle for Bascom: an epic snowball fight between the Southeast and the Lakeshore residence halls.

On December 9, 2009, troops from the Southeast launched snowballs at the brave Lakeshore residents on the front lines. The Lakeshore brigade was unyielding, pushing forward until it claimed Bascom. As the battle fizzled, the carnage was clear: beards were crystallized with icicles, eyeglasses were fogged and askew. A man in a banana suit reached for a fallen comrade, who must have been quite chilled, as he was clad only in a Speedo.

The event had been organized on Facebook several weeks earlier as an attempt to break the unofficial record for the world’s largest snowball fight. A perfectly timed snow day was a happy accident … or was it? As snow blanketed Madison the evening of December 8, 2009, students took to Twitter to ask then-chancellor Biddy Martin for the day off. Then, at 7:45 p.m., Martin famously tweeted that campus would close. Just minutes later, residents of Sellery and Ogg commenced a smaller skirmish across the impassable Dayton Street. (This was the first full campus closure in nearly twenty years, and one of only eight in history.)

The 2009 snowball fight saw nearly four thousand combatants, just short of what was needed to break the record. But that didn’t dampen the flame: the Battle for Bascom continued to become a tradition. Subsequent fights took place on February 2, 2011; December 20, 2012; and February 8, 2015. So far, Lakeshore is undefeated.

Though millenials may argue otherwise, the very first Battle for Bascom actually took place many years ago, on a snowy day in 1923. Rather than residence hall communities drawing a line in the sand (er, snow), UW law and engineering students duked it out. There was no documented winner (but our money’s on the engineers).

Photo: Jeff Miller.

During Hoofers’ Winter Carnival last February, students built themselves a classmate out of snow on Lake Mendota. Hoofers are the Union’s outdoors activities clubs. The next Winter Carnival will run February 2 to 8, 2015, and beneath their mittens, Hoofers have their fingers crossed for ice and snow. The event has been part of the Union since the 1920s — a much longer life than this poor top-hatted gent experienced. RIP, Frosty: rest in puddle.