thehowe_v7.1

So there's this hill down the road from the house I'm living in. It's about a 200 foot run at almost a 35° incline. Last week, we got a lot of snow. My housemate Eric got the good idea to go sledding. Let me just say this: if you're ever at Meijer and you see a large green plastic saucer sled manufactured by a company called esp, buy it. So anyways, we got some sleds and we went out to this hill, at about 11:30 at night. Kids had obviously been on the hill all day, so the snow was quite well packed, and somebody had built some pretty damn sturdy snow ramps near the bottom of the hill.

Picture this: you're shooting down this hill pretty damn fast, and you're getting close to the bottom. You avoided the first snow ramp about 2/3^rds of the way down, and you see the second one coming up, so you steer towards it. Then in an instant, you come to a realization: there's a drop right after the snow ramp. A three foot drop, at about 55° - if you hit that ramp, you'll get about 4 foot of air before you hit the ground. And, once you've hit the ground, you'll only have about 3 yards to stop before you hit the tree line.

So anyways, both Eric and I came to this realization as we were nearing the bottom on the green saucer sled of death (he didn't believe me the first time). Here's an idea of how fast we were going: I dug in my heels about 2 yards before I hit the 3 foot drop, and I still went over the edge. Eric dug in his heels at about the same spot, hit the snow ramp with one, and instead of stopping actually got flipped over.

It was totally awesome.