Last week, I shared with you many examples of the unimpressive creations my siblings and I can and have made from snow. From prone snowmen to collapsing caves to snow forts that only come up to our knees, we’re living proof that mediocrity is necessary in order for others to excel.
Luckily, we’re able to compensate for our inability to build with snow by being especially good at sledding in it. For a group of people who have never been skiing, skating, snowshoeing, snowmobiling or snowboarding in our lives, we certainly know our way around a plastic toboggan.
In fact, use of a sled is not even a requirement of our kind of sledding. We’ve been known to go sledding on nothing but our backsides or our stomachs — sometimes at the expense of our snow pants and coat zippers. We will sled on anything, anytime, with only the slightest provocation. There doesn’t even need to be much snow on the ground.
However, with that said, we’re not without standards and there are certain places and sledding experiences we rank higher than others.
We’re lucky enough to have a great sledding hill just up the road from us, in our grandma’s backyard. Her house is at the top of the hill, which is almost a tenth of a mile from top to bottom. It’s ideal for sledding.
But that hill is not without its drawbacks.
The thrilling part of sledding on Grandma’s hill is that there’s a fence running along the bottom of the hill. We discovered that a sled loaded with two 80-ish pound kids (or maybe one 100-pound teenager and a 50-pound younger sibling) and that sled runs into a solid barrier, such as a fence, the passengers will come to a sudden and complete stop.
We rammed the fence a few times before we realized it worked better for everyone to just bail out of the sled seconds before impact.
Sledding becomes a high contact sport even when we’re just in our own backyard. When Dad clears our driveway with the tractor, his four- to five-foot snow piles are quickly converted into slopes for sledding on. These quickly become the site of highly competitive races, often involving sledding tracks that have had water poured over them so they ice up.
There is, according to us, nothing better than throwing yourself on your stomach down a sharp three-foot drop and then (hopefully) having that momentum carry you another bumpy 30 feet.
Most of the time we’re satisfied by finding new ways to spice up our home sledding experience, but I should probably add that there was one time Grandpa hooked up a dozen sleds behind the four-wheel pickup and took us for a spin in the field.
Don’t try this at home, but if you should ever find yourself on a plastic sled tied to the hitch of the pickup, just remember not to fall out.
Never let it be said the Clan doesn’t know how to make sledding fun.