That is what the boy called it. The Hill From Hell. 1500 feet long with about a 150 foot drop. Some days when the snow blows children play there, tumbling in the billowy fluffy. Other days when the fields are green, rabbits gambol. But when it is a sheet of crusted and lumpy ice, morons from Canada go there and naively accept that speeds pushing the acceptable pace of a car in town are the sort of thing that makes for a fun Sunday morning.
The oldest child afterward noted that the rustic man with the first aid kit at the top of the mountain was not going to have been much help. They were exhilarated after the first run. They begged to stop after the second.
The photo at the right? That is a zoom shot of the lower half. Click on it. See that faint haze of orange at the bottom? That keeps you out from under the wheels of cars and, across the road, the lake. It doesn't have a hope against an eight year old on a flying saucer.
It is in a park. A park like any other park. It almost ate my family.


Comments
Renee - January 26, 2009 10:41 PM
I'll get my coat!
Renee - January 26, 2009 10:43 PM
Damian asks if that's a safety device or if somebody just forgot to take down their badminton net.
Jay Currie - January 27, 2009 2:47 AM
I am so there (well, except for the cold and my advanced age which requires - BIG HONKING INNERTUBES! )
This is long but it is not that steep. In my youth there was, and may still be now that we have Winter again in Vancouver, a hill at Queen Elizabeth Park which was the side of an old quarry. You got your toboggan (useful with Vancouver slush), sleigh, flying saucer or truck tire inner tube and you pushed off. At the end was a road and then a pond with Vancouver thin ice. You had a better chance with a car. (Thought the tubes had the merit of floating as the sleighs sank all of two feet.)
And, for reasons I never figured out, you did it in the dark; by the weedy light of two orange streetlights a hundred yards apart.
It was great!