My wild and crazy childhood sledding story involves an old VW Beetle hood, some quilts and a cow pasture. It was faster than we bargained for, with every terrace it went airborne. I bailed out after the first barbed wire fence. My friend, whose idea this was, stayed with it to the bitter end. Through two more barbed wire fences and crashed onto a frozen pond. The ice was thin and the pond was shallow. He waded out. Cut, bruised, soaked with clothing starting to freeze and it scared the heck out of him. That VW hood is still in there to my knowledge.
We had the “Seven Sisters” hill. Each “sister” was a larger hump as you descended. You’d get airborne by the third, and the last one (if you could stay aboard the sled) would launch you 10-15 feet in the air, to land on the river ice.
The whole hillside is condoms now. Sigh.
(NOT a typo. I refer to those filing cabinet dwellings as condoms, not condominiums.)
We used a car hood once on a local hill. After a couple of times, we grew tired of dragging it up the hill. Instead, we packed some snow under it at the base of the hill to make a ramp. Five of us piled on a tractor trailer inner tube to test the ramp. Problem was, we made the ramp angle too steep in respect to the hill. It was like a deep V, instead of a shallow angle. When we hit the ramp, the tube stopped dead - but we kept going in all directions. It was a pretty good lesson in geometry and physics.