At midnight Friday, while students around campus were partying, three students sat down after 12 hours of hiking and gave $100 in cash.

Jeron Elliott, Sean Quinn and Casey Deck were three of 19 students who participated in the first fundraiser for A Campus Journey on Friday at the King

Memorial Commons. Walkers had to strap on a backpack filled with one-third their weight in sand, and those who walked the longest received a prize of $100 in cash.

“It was just stubborn pride,” said Quinn, a junior history and anthropology major. “That’s the only thing that kept us going.”

A Campus Journey, a Student Association-approved organization, was founded by Carole Jo Utech last summer. Utech, a senior art major, plans to walk the 2,167-mile Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine starting Feb. 2, 2002, to raise money for cancer research centers at half a dozen universities throughout the nation. At each of 25 stops, Utech will meet a different group of 10 or more people to walk part of the trail. The fundraisers are designed to show people what trail hiking is like on a campus scale, Utech said.

The day had started at 11 a.m. when students began to register. After President John Peters spoke to the crowd, the walking began at 1 p.m.

Quinn said at first the walkers made a continual loop around the MLK Commons. He and two women had to enlist the help of a stereo to keep up the pace.

“We just started singing,” Quinn said. “We were all just walking around, singing Beatles music. That’s what kept us going.”

After the first two or three hours, walkers started dropping out, Utech said.

“By 6 p.m., half were still there,” she said. “I honestly didn’t expect people to make it past eight hours.”

Fernandez said the $100 wasn’t his motivation.

“The way I looked at it is it wasn’t so much about who won or the prizes,” Fernandez said. “It was about pride … keeping each other going.”

The call of food and the bars began to ring, leaving only five people by 9 p.m. Then a female student left, leaving only four.

“It was like our own little Northern ‘Survivor,'” Quinn said. “It was crazy.”

Utech said the Office of Campus Recreation trip leaders decided to take the remaining walkers on tougher terrain — the steps of the library, parking garage and Holmes Student Center.

Fernandez said he ended up dropping out at 11 p.m. because of a shooting pain in his ankle.

“We all did more or less 30 miles,” Fernandez said. “We all said we would do it again. There definitely was a bond between the last five.”

Quinn said he, Deck and Elliott decided to finish at midnight and donate the money to charity upon Deck’s suggestion.

All the walkers had to put up $20 to register for the walk, and sponsorships are due Friday.

“I think we’re all looking for sponsors,” Fernandez said.

Walkers will have to get up a little earlier for the next fundraiser, which starts at 7 a.m. April 7.

“This way they’ll really get a feeling of what it’s like to wake up and put a backpack on,” Utech said. “You wake up, have breakfast and you’re on the trail within a half-hour.”

The money from fundraisers goes into A Campus Journey’s general fund. Eighty percent goes toward cancer research at different universities, 10 percent goes toward administrative fees like flyers and t-shirts, 5 percent goes to the Appalachian Trail Conference and 5 percent comes back to NIU to set up scholarships.