Questionable Sledding

I did it again. I went sledding. This time on a more random/dangerous hill then usual. Quite fun though. I never once made it to the bottom and generally hurled myself with great speed into the same spot of trees each time I went down on my crazy carpet (aka highly buffed sheet of plastic which easily reaches mach 7 in two seconds).

After rolling head first into the forest a few too many times Bryan, David, Cory and I decided that we'd better try something a little different. If we were hurling into the trees every time by ourselves, why not all go at once, go at least 20 times as fast and see if momentum will carry us past the curve with the trees and all the way down the hill?

Seems like sound judgement to me!

We did pretty good. Cory nearly lost his man-hood, we all nearly broke our tailbones, I lost a good portion of skin on my fore-arm and we all participated in sledding positions that were questionable at best and upon further consideration after the fact we all were very thankful that nobody was watching. Strange what seems normal when you are in the dark, want to sled faster then any human has ever gone and will go to any lengths to get there.

Questionable positions or not I believe we got the most air-time that I have ever experienced on a sledding expedition. And for those of you who have read past accounts, you know that this is a serious occurance. Somehow we made a train of four guys on two crazy carpets, took off from the top of the hill, made it past the evil trees that would suck us in and promptly launched off a remarkable free-fall section of the hill. I thought we'd just slip down the steep section, but I did not take into account my physics education. Apparently our collective forward momentum and force was far greater then the force of gravity for about 20 seconds. Instead of cupping the ground, we shot straight out, were strangely silent as we sailed through the star filled sky and then crumpled into a heap of arms and legs as gravity once again did it's job.

That hurt.

A normal human being would have stopped at that point. But since we all apparently gave ourselves brain damage we hiked up to the top of the hill and tried to do it all over again. This is when the injuries started. I think my favorite was being able to see where David and Bryan's heads plowed an impressive swath through the snow before their bodies made any mark. This is about when we decided to stop.

Did I mention that Bryan didn't have any pants on underneath his snow-pants?

We finally decided to stop hurting outselves, went to get coffee at 2nd Cup in Red Deer and then soaked our pains away in the Torwalt Hot Tub. It is a wonderful hot tub. But I did suffer an impressive amount of road rash down my right arm and a 10cm open wound doesn't feel good in said hot tub. Oh well. What can you do?

We are looking forward to another sledding extravaganza in the coming weeks up here in St. Albert. We have THE BEST sledding hill. It's huge, steep like you wouldn't believe and the only thing you can hit are unsuspecting children and the back of a school that is far, far away. So instead of sledding directly into the forest, we are going to try our new found skills and see what speeds we can reach when unleashed on the open slopes.

Let's see... in past sledding expeditions on 7 Hills we nearly killed Andy as he hit an ice-jump going backwards at the end of the hill on a crazy-carpet, thought we had either broken or dislocated Kay's shoulder, Ricky got run over by a giant inner tube, kicked in the face with a boot and started bleeding, Jason and I witnessed a man get taken off the hill via ambulance and I've seen many small children get horrifically run down or bucked off the end of their sleds only to roll uncontrolably down the remaining length of hill.

Have I ever told you about the time I took a table top snow board jump on a plastic disc? And this doesn't even begin to touch the sledding adventure Kay and I had at Eagle's Nest. That truly is a day that will live in infamy.

Anyway... stay tuned for the upcoming sledding adventures. As everyone knows... it's my favorite thing around.