Sledding Trail

Fun, opportunity, and keeping the kids outside in winter. Fun - who doesn't love a good sled ride? Opportunity - we are lucky enough to have about 50 feet of vertical drop in our yard, presenting the unique opportunity to build a sledding run. Keeping the kids outside - I must admit as I write, I have not been super successful on this front, but my goal is to make the outdoors as inviting as possible to my kids. It's especially difficult to get kids outside in cold or wet weather, but my hope was that a sledding track would get them outside to trudge up and down a hill while laughing and having a bit of fun at the same time on some of those cold days.

This is a trail designed specifically for the snow tubes we already owned (LL Bean's larger size). Having made many temporary sledding runs out of snow, it occurred to me that if I made the trail out of dirt in the summer, I'd have the advantage of not having to rebuild the trail from scratch every sledding day. The layout of the trail was motivated by my wish to make use of as much of our modest 50 foot vertical drop as possible. The general procedure: - find a route from the max to min elevation in the yard that never goes uphill, won't permit absurd/dangerous speeds, and plausibly get the rider from the top to the bottom under most snow conditions. - trim out underbrush that blocks the route (this was most important at the very top, where I needed to clear about 50 feet of dense underbrush. - build out the banked turns with sod, dirt fill and a bit of topsoil (the topsoil is nice because it let me plant wildflower seeds that help the trail resist erosion during the occasional torrential summer rain storm. - test it out extensively during the first winter - make corrections to help correct where the problem spots are Costs: I don't know how many hours I spent moving dirt for this project, but it was a lot over the first two summers the trail was active. I spent over $1k on dirt fill and topsoil. Now that the trail is established, I only need to do minimal maintenance: I trim back the vegetation a couple times over the summer and I might have to cut down an ambitious sumac that tried to grow in the middle of the trail.

1. It's impossible to build the trail for all snow conditions. When the snow is wet and heavy, you can barely get halfway down the trail. When the snow has melted and refrozen into ice, the trail gets too fast and you can't stay in the track. Also, on any given sledding day, the trail will get faster as more and more sledders go down it. We use a landscaping flag to indicate how far up the starting chute is safe and gradually move it lower as sledders get going too fast. 2. The hardest part of this project (and what separates it from many other projects) is that you don't have unlimited iterations on adjusting the track and testing it out. I get one iteration per year: alter the track in the summer, test it in the winter. I can't make small adjustments and test repeatedly, I just have to take a big swing at what I think the best corrections are each year and hope it works out. Luckily, most of the problems were ironed out in the first two years. 3. If I control the trajectory of the sledder coming into a turn, the banked turn I have to build can be much smaller in height. 4. It helps to have helpers! (Thanks Randy & Jenny!) 5. And thanks for supporting me Kelsey even though I spent half the kids' college fund on dirt!