On Saturday, August 29, the steady rhythm of splashing and the high-pitched shrieks of young captains will return to the lap pool at the Park City Municipal Athletic Recreation Center, better known simply as the MARC. It will be the sixth running of the Cardboard Boat Race, Park City Recreation's homemade farewell-to-summer celebration, and if the past half-decade is any guide, the water will be crowded with unicorns, pirate ships, sharks, and at least one masterpiece that stays gloriously dry from one end of the pool to the other.
The premise is gloriously simple. Teams of up to three young captains, ages five to fifteen, are given three oversized cardboard boxes, a single roll of duct tape, and an official rulebook, then challenged to turn that humble pile of paper and adhesive into a craft worthy of crossing the MARC's lap pool. Registration for this year's race opened in summer; those who signed up by the August 20 deadline received their official starter kits at the MARC, while late arrivals, if any space remains, can still compete but must fend for themselves when it comes to building materials. Every registered captain earns a participant medal regardless of how the morning ends, whether their boat glides smoothly across the finish line or sinks in spectacular, soggy fashion.
The competition itself is built for maximum drama and maximum laughter. Racers check in between 9:30 and 10 a.m., and the heats begin promptly at ten, running one after another across the pool. In between, advancing teams get a chance to patch and repair their cardboard hulls before the next round. The top boat in each heat moves directly to the championship race, while every eliminated crew gets one final shot in what the organizers affectionately call a grudge match, a second-chance round to claw a way back into the finals. Costumes and elaborately decorated boats are strongly encouraged, which is how past races have produced everything from a unicorn to a pirate ship to a fearsome shark bobbing in the water next to more conventional paddlers.
The tradition has a surprisingly recent and poignant origin. The race was born in 2020, in the strangest summer most of us have lived through, when Spencer Madanay, then a recreation coordinator at Park City Recreation, was looking for a way to get families out of the house and safely engaged while the pandemic kept normal gatherings at a distance. The cardboard-and-duct-tape challenge proved to be a perfect fit, something outdoors, hands-on, and thoroughly self-contained, and its success turned a one-off experiment into an enduring institution. By 2023, the fourth annual race drew fifteen cardboard craft into the MARC pool, and the day ended with a ship called The Grey Pearl, captained by Park City siblings Owen, Clark, and Davis Pitkin, paddling its way to victory. The event's success even inspired a winter counterpart, the Cardboard Sled Derby, which Madanay and the department launched on the sled hill outside the Park City Ice Arena.
This year's sixth edition carries a little extra significance, as it unfolds at a MARC that has just been through its own reopening. The MARC's pools were closed for renovations, with the reopening planned for June, marked by a ribbon-cutting ceremony. When the cardboard fleet arrives in late August, they will be some of the first paddlers to test their boxed crafts on the freshly renewed water, a fitting way to send the summer out in splashes.
For all its whimsy, the Cardboard Boat Race is really a lesson wrapped in corrugated paper. It teaches kids and their parents that a plan can come together with limited materials, that the process of building matters as much as the result, and that when the plan fails halfway across the pool, the fun is precisely in the failure. There are winners and losers in the literal sense, of course, the grudge match and finals crown at least one champion, but the spirit of the day is generous, and the prize that matters most is the morning full of laughs and the shared, slightly damp memory that comes with it.
The event is a fixture of Park City's summer, an uncomplicated goodbye to the season that has become a way for families to mark the end of long, sunlit days before school begins again. It asks almost nothing of its participants except imagination and a tolerance for soggy cardboard, and it returns outsized rewards in the form of community and delight. As the recreation department puts it, sail on. And with the freshly reopened pool and the sixth fleet of cardboard captains ready to launch, this year's farewell promises to be a memorable one. On Saturday, August 29, the MARC at 1200 Little Kate Road will open its doors to the usual morning cacophony: the scrape of tape being pulled, the whisper of children plotting their grandest watercraft, and the splash of an annual tradition that began as a pandemic-era gamble and became one of Park City's most reliably joyful summer rituals. For anyone wondering whether cardboard can really float, the answer has always been the same: on this one morning every year, it doesn't matter much whether it does.