Christmas snow sends sledders to hills at Spokane parks, schools

South Hill resident Mike Currie had just popped his inner tube flying down a hill at Manito Park with his 11-year-old son, Eathen, on Christmas afternoon.

He wanted his year-old American bulldog and pitbull mix, Tank, to get his first taste of sledding, too. So he did what any logical dog owner would do.

Currie took Tank in his lap and attempted the hill on his rump.

“He’s over it,” Currie said, laughing, after tumbling head-over-heels, prompting Tank to safely scamper down the hill.

Currie, Tank, Eathen and his 9-year-old brother, Izeck, were some of the dozens who took advantage of a snowy Christmas Sunday to get in some sledding and other wintry outdoor fun. Sledders, snowshoers and even a cross-country skier or two filled Manito with laughter and hollering on a cloudy afternoon.

Nine-year-old Dylan Husk, wearing a Seattle Seahawks winter hat, climbed aboard a Snowmoto machine – resembling a bike with sled runners instead of wheels – and skidded down a smaller hill as his uncle, Christopher Dennis, looked on. Husk said it wasn’t harder to steer than a regular sled.

“It’s faster, for sure,” said Husk, who said he got a mini-drone and a Pikachu piggy bank for Christmas.

Across the park, a group of uniform-clad friends – two of them Spokane Chiefs teammates – started a pickup hockey game on the frozen Duck Pond.

“This makes Christmas that much better,” Tanner Moyer said during a break. The young men – including Moyer, Kienan Scott, Johnny Marzec, Jake Holden and Chiefs players Keanu and Kailer Yamamoto – said they didn’t know who cleared the ice, but they’d been playing pickup hockey at the park for years.

Farther up the South Hill, at Chase Middle School, 7-year-old Sam Elwell slipped down a hill on a blue boogie board, flying into the air at the bottom after hitting a bump in the snow.

“There was a secret jump,” he told his onlooking parents, smiling.

On the other side of the parking lot, Chase student Justin Curtis, 14, performed a front flip at the top of a large hill, then skidded halfway to the bottom on his shoes.

“This is the best spot, at least where you don’t have to pay,” said Curtis, an eighth-grader at Chase.

Lam Nguyen, an 18-year-old student at Boise State University, careened down hills Sunday on his first sledding outing. Nguyen, a native of Hanoi, Vietnam, is spending the holiday from school with the family of his college roommate, Blake Hodge. Nguyen also experienced his first American Christmas this year, he said.

“It’s kind of weird, but so fun,” Nguyen said. “We don’t wrap presents and give them to kids.”

Back at Manito, Currie grinned as he watched his sons tussle over whose turn it was to sled down the hill on the family’s one remaining inner tube.

“This has always been a good place to bring the kids,” he said.