Big slushy snowballs and The Monkey Trail

Wet, heavy, perfect snow for snowballs and snowmen. Not so magnificent for sledding, but we gave it a shot down at the school anyway. Lots of snowball throwing and good silly fun. Not much that’s better than giggling girls in the snow.
The best, slickest run on the steepest hill is, of course, right up against the school building, so the whole time they’re on it I’m watching with a parent’s trepidation that they’re going to go headlong into the bricks. They were careful and it didn’t happen. Made me remember our favorite toboggan trail when we were kids, The Monkey Trail.
It was at Collins Park in Scotia, which generally had some good, long slopes — nothing extremely steep, but you could get some nice long rides in the right conditions. What seemed like a million of us guys would drag our rigs — toboggans, sleds. battered flying saucers, and one of the first of the plastic contraptions, known as “The Kitchen Sink” — all the way up across Mohawk Avenue and to the park behind the library, where there was a long ridge that led from the parking lot and picnic areas down to the lake. Local legend had it that this had once been a Mohawk torture ground (no, I’m not kidding). It was a great sledding hill, and it attracted a lot of people, but it wasn’t much of a challenge. We would build ramps and jumps and so on to make it more dangerous. But when those weren’t enough, we would wander down to the extreme edge of the park, to a little space about three feet wide that ran along the park fence, down the hill toward the lake. The trail was a little twisted, quite bumpy, and had some significant tree roots in the way. There was a chain link fence on the left and trees on the right, and in order to deal with the roots we had to pile up snow on them and make little jumps. It was fast as hell. It was The Monkey Trail. It was generally too dangerous for unsteerable things like flying saucers, but with a fully loaded toboggan of boys, you could go so screamingly fast you could almost make it to the lake. It was very cool.
And like any good parent, I’d kill my kids if they ever went down something like it.