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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Chilling on the hill slide


Sledders, boarders and parents stand perched atop a hill at Valley Mission Park ready to take to the slopes.
 (Rajah Bose / The Spokesman-Review)
Steve Christilaw Correspondent

After a holiday season that did its best to convince the shopping public that the only way to have fun was to play Halo 3 or Guitar Hero II, it’s refreshing to know that low-tech can still rule the day.

It’s an ages-old recipe. Start with a good amount of newly fallen snow spread over a sweeping, gentle slope – a slope like the ones at Valley Mission Park. Find something large enough to sit or lie on, preferably with a slick bottom surface. Combine. Yields hours of fun, gales of laughter and family memories to last a lifetime.

Just watch.

You’ll see kids laughing and playing and having the time of their lives. You see fathers sliding downhill hand-in-hand with sons and daughters and older siblings teaching the finer points of sliding to younger brothers and sisters.

At one point Sunday, a red-cheeked dad and his oldest daughter double-teamed her little sister: Dad on one side; older sister on the other. Holding hands, the threesome flew down the hill – the first time little sister made it all the way to the bottom without topping over.

You see parents and grandparents with video recorders capturing all the fun. They’re called targets.

You’ll laugh as you watch excited sliders climb the hill, slipping and sliding all the way – and you’ll discover the law of nature that decrees that nine out of 10 people slip and fall on the penultimate step at the top of the hill.

Better still, you’ll belly laugh when the occasional slider get bowled over by another – at which time the gathered throng stop and guffaw. It’s like watching someone make a snow angel face-first.

It’s a prototypical sledding hill but for one problem. You rarely spy a sled.

You see neoprene mats, super slick plastic on one side, rope handles on the other. You see plastic mats that unroll to be slightly larger than a placemat. You see plastic versions of the old Flexible Flyer disks, plastic versions of the classic toboggan and plastic sleds that appear to be oversized versions of paint trays. You can even find plastic versions of a snowboard, but without the hard edge needed for turning mid-hill.

You see bits and pieces of these plastic sliding devices cast aside near the bales of straw that protect errant sliders from flying off into a grove of trees.

But no sleds. Nothing with runners and a built-in ability to steer.

If you want to find a real, honest-to-goodness sled, you need to do one of three things: A, hunt through someone’s garage because it once was an unwritten law of the cosmos that garages have sleds hanging from rafters; B, do a keyword search on the Internet – in other words, do a high-tech search for a low-tech item; or C, rent a copy of Citizen Kane and fast forward to the end to discover the real identity of Rosebud.

“We don’t have any sleds this year,” said Barb Cole from Peters Hardware. “But we did have them last year.”

There was a time when the local hardware store was the go-to spot for a Flexible Flyer or a Yankee Clipper sled.

“Absolutely – but in those days there weren’t specialty stores to go to either,” Cole said.

A quick check of local department stores reveals the Flexible Flyer brand-name still attached to snow disks – most of them plastic, although there was one bright red metal Flexible Flyer tucked in a corner of one Spokane Valley store.

“I don’t remember off-hand who makes these sleds,” Cole said. “But I know it wasn’t a name like the old sleds. And it wasn’t the kind of thing where you can find a supplier to get them to you. It was at a hardware show and you had to order the sleds at the show.

“They sell – that’s never been a problem.”

But if you stand at the top of the hill and watch for a few minutes, you realize that you’re the only one thinking about sleds. The kids are having too much fun to miss anything but the hat that flew off on the way down.

And then you watch a young boy, decked out in new snow pants, make the lowest of low-tech runs. He rubbed his mittens over his backside for a few seconds, sit down in the snow, point his toes to the sky and push off. No sled. No pad. No mat.

He just laughed all the way to the bottom.

Who could ask for more?