That is a question that should never have been asked about a sledding hill. Sledding is not about stopping, it is about adrenaline. The goal is to find a good hill that provides the ultimate excitement with plenty of opportunity to get injured in all sorts of unpleasant ways. One with lots of jumps, twists and snow banks offering cushioning from sledders sent airborne. Messy details like how to stop can be worked out later, but anyone who insisted stopping in some form of "safe" manner is likely to get written off as a woos. When I was a child, our favored means of stopping usually involved trees or for the more daring, rusty barbed wire.
My husband knows this, but parenthood does weird things to people's brains. So when we stood at the base of "Double Dips", a local sledding haunt, he had the audacity to ask this question. We had only that day been made aware of this hill and had driven by to check it out. Our son is five now and it was time to initiate him into the world of real sledding. He had gone down small slopes in our yard but these were the equivalent of sledding bunny slopes. He was not ready for the hard core X Games version of sledding yet, but it was time for more than this. The Double Dips were actually not that dangerous at all. If they were, the city would not have gone to the length of actually blocking off the two city blocks that comprised the slope to traffic every year with saw horses. This was a decent place to take a kid sledding but how to stop should not have been a concern in my eyes.
This hill was set up with a long stretch at the end of the hill for one's sled to slow down. We took our son sledding and his plastic saucer just drifted to a stop. Fine for young children. But I still long for the days of my youth when we were always in pursuit of "extreme sledding". This was far before the X Games were conceived and no one used any trendy terms like "airs" or "gnarly" to describe our self destructive behaviors. We never knew there was anything that could be viewed as a sport to our activities. We just knew that if we could find the biggest, most dangerous, scariest hill to go sledding on, we had succeeded in our quest.
For us the kind of sled that was used was almost as important as the hill. The old fashioned wooden sled had the advantage of control so it could be used on the more tortuous slopes or on the more treacherous side paths that a simple toboggan could not navigate. Of course having a total lack of control had its own attraction as it significantly increases the danger element. Toboggans lack control, but inner tubes are far superior as they raise the center of gravity making the fall off the sled more dramatic. The best ones are the real ones intended for use in a tire, especially an old one with a bulge on the side that guarantees it will not go straight and one will end up running into a tree or other obstacle
Which goes back to the question of "How do you stop?" Easy, roll off the sled before you hit the barbed wire fence at the bottom of the hill. Run head on into a tree. Steer into the snow bank at the bottom of the hill and hope that you do not get buried. Take your chances with the barbed wire. Sure, you can do the spin out maneuver with a wooden sled if you know how, but the above options are scarier, riskier and far more gratifying. The goal is to get a thrill and scare the Hell out of Mom, not be safe. Safe is for dorks.
Which brings us back to the hill where we brought our five year old son. My husband is not a wimp when it comes to sledding. He knows all about sledding into barbed wire and hairpin turns with a wooden sled. It is just that he is the worried parent now and is not ready to face his son sledding straight into a snow bank. At least not yet.
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