On Friday, Sept. 25, the Social Activities Council (SAC) hosted its second annual Fall Festival on the Fiske Quad. This event featured many attractions like axe throwing, a mechanical bull, rock climbing and more.
Two friends expressed how they both were able to enjoy rock climbing at the event.
“My favorite part was watching my friend do rock climbing,” said first-year Riley Yerakes.
“My favorite part was rock climbing,” said first-year Alexis Caouette.
The wall stood at 24 feet tall and had different levels of climbing. Students wore a harness and were attached to a bungee cord to make sure they could climb safely.
Axe throwing provided many options for students to try out throwing. This included axes, tomahawks, stars, batarangs, a fireman’s axe and a shovel. Students aimed their weapons at the target and fired away, trying their best to hit the red dot in the middle. Four blue dots surrounded the red dot in the center and proved to be more of a challenge for students to hit.
The mechanical bull had five stages for students to try out, with stage one being super slow and stage five taking the speed to the max. The longest someone was able to stay on the bull’s back was a minute and a half.
The festival also featured three inflatables: The Floor is Lava, Wrecking Ball and Jousting.
The Floor is Lava had students try to cross the inflatable by jumping on three large mountain-like balls without falling off into the lava-themed inflatable floor below. “So far my favorite part is the bouncy lava thing,” first-year Hannah Ingalls said.
Senior SAC executive Board member Michael Peachey gave insight on how Fall Festival is planned. “We do emails back and forth between the vendor companies, Vertical Entertainment and Keene Access. We email back and forth, set up contracts, what we want, what we don’t want. When it happens for contracts, we just let contracts go through the system, we put in the expenditure forms, we purchase everything. We have to get here early, we help with set up, we help with breakdown. It’s a pretty simple process,” said Peachey.
Peachey gave his perspective on why SAC does the event, “It’s meant to get [students] out of their rooms. You have all the dorms around the campus, you have classrooms here, too. It’s to get people to come out, meet new people cause lots of freshmen don’t have a lot of friends. I put it later on, so those who wanted to come have some people to come with,” Peachey said.
This year, the SAC executive board said they wanted to keep vendors in the area and not include a live artist.
“Usually I have a live artist, but this year I decided not to do a live artist, rather do a Keene axe-like mobile trailer, kinda more fun. It gets a local vendor in here to promote the downtown of Keene, stuff like that. Overall, it’s a great fun thing,” Peachey shared.
Arianna Young can be contacted at
ayoung@kscequinox.com
