Police tell students to get off Mt. Simmons
CORRECTION TO THIS ARTICLE: An earlier version of this article used the wrong pronoun for Dheera Venkatraman PhD '15.
Police tell students to get off Mt. Simmons
Students scaling the mountainous pile of snow behind Simmons Hall in past weeks were confronted by police officers and told to leave. Some were reportedly threatened with arrest if they did not comply.
By multiple accounts, police told climbers to get off the nearly five-story mountain. In an email to The Tech, Jeremy Warnick, a spokesman for the Cambridge Police, cited public safety as their chief concern, “trespassing aside.”
“Falling from any significantly large snow mountain could lead to an injury or something more severe,” Warnick said.
Students nevertheless continued to entertain themselves on the snow pile, whether to climb, sled, or even snowboard down what was dubbed “Mt. Simmons.” Some were also careful to avoid getting caught.
“My friends and I climbed it in swimsuits … When we heard that the police were on their way, we took some hasty but necessary selfies and scrambled off,” Wendi Gurazio ’18 said. “I don’t think any of us has ever been arrested, but I’m certain that none of us wanted our first time to be in bikinis.”
MIT students aren’t the only ones seemingly fixated on the mountain. The Boston Globe published an article focusing on Dheera Venkatraman’s (PhD ’15) experience trekking the mountain. An avid winter hiker, he forwent a visit to the White Mountains and visited Mt. Simmons instead. A Buzzfeed post with over 2 million views also featured Mt. Simmons.
Over the past week, excavators and trucks have been spotted removing snow from the mountain and taking it elsewhere. The previously towering snow pile now stands at only around two stories tall.
—William A. Rodríguez