Jan 31, 2010

What did you use to go sledding down a hill in the snow?

Living on a farm we had an interesting change in the way we did things. This was one of them. Dad had a piece of equipment that we used on the farm to work the ground and it had large metal disks and needless to say was used for disking the fields. Once the ground was plowed the disk hooked to the back of the tractor would break all of the clods up and make it easier to level the ground, plant it and them mark it for irrigating. Dad however found another use for these old disks. He would weld metal handles onto the sides and then we would take those to the top of the hill. It would take several rides down the hill to make a trail (and we were usually pretty tired by that time since we had to pull that heavy metal disk back to the top after each slide down the hill. So consequently the sledding ended after just a few runs down the hill. There was one interesting thing however and that was if you hit a tree the disk just bounced off. (We usually didn’t though but yet we were never hurt. We did have a traditional sled as well but it was a lot harder to find a place to use it and thus we seldom rode it.

The old sleigh of my youth.