Is it weird to still enjoy sledding at the age of 60? 

I got to wondering that recently thanks to a group text my older sister started with my siblings and me recently. She lives in Dallas and was thrilled to have measurable snowfall in her neighborhood from a recent cold front that brought the white stuff to much of the South. She was ready to get her grandkids on a sled and was texting friends (and siblings mistakenly) about whether they’d be ready to get on the hill that Saturday. This, of course, spurred my brother who is three years older than me to send a video of a sluice he’d created on his property in Idaho. That run includes turns and banks as gnarly as any Olympic bobsled track, and the video showed him tearing down it with one of his grandkids in his lap, her screaming all the way. 

I think sometimes that we older folks like sledding more than the kids do, and we just use them as an excuse to set our butts on a flimsy piece of plastic and let gravity have its way. Or maybe it’s just us Joneses. Given my siblings and I mostly grew up in the south, snow was, and for some of us still is, a novelty usually only seen in Hallmark Christmas movies and news reports about epic winter storms. Of the six of us, my youngest sister and I were the first ones to experience living in an area where snow was common. 

My first sledding experience was some 40 years ago. It was on one of those round saucers that you can never keep facing forward as you slide down the hill. That was fun, but I quickly realized that hurtling down a slope backwards can be a little nerve wracking. Later I discovered the more straight forward models that folks mostly use today. But I must admit one of my favorite types of sleds is also perhaps the one with the longest lineage, the old Flexible Flyer design. You know, the ones where you put your feet on the wings at the front of the vehicle for steering and use a rope tied to it for holding on. Those take a special kind of snow, a deeper and more packed down version upon which the rails can glide over instead of digging into. 

Nowadays, I have our youngest grandchild as a reason to break out the sled and hit the slopes. I fondly recall the first time we went with her and how she got a face full of powder on the way down. At the bottom, her eyes were wide and her face was framed with frost because, of course, snow sports enthusiast that I am, I didn’t take the slow and easy way down, but rather the fast and thrilling track. Needless to say, she wasn’t too eager to sled for the rest of that year. But the following winter she was all over it, laughing and wanting to go “again, again!”.

Our older grandkids are now in their 20s and of course too cool to go sledding anymore. It makes one wonder if there’s a natural progression in such things. After a certain age, do kids give up on it because it’s not hip enough, only to restart when there’s a kid present with whom they can relive childhood thrills? If that’s so, oh, the tragedy of those wasted between years when they could have been zooming down the steep parts of their neighborhood park after every good dump! 

These days my slope of choice is usually the huge pile of snow at the back of our condominium parking lot or the hill at the Dillon Nature Preserve. Personally, I prefer the “keep it simple” approach. However, grownups being grownups, society has managed to transform something fun and exciting in its unsophistication into an epic production filled with all the trappings that come with adulthood. So, rather than climb the hill, we build magic carpets to get to the top and replace plastic sleds with industrial tire tubes that spin you around as you’re flying down a slope bigger than most ski hills back east. Don’t get me wrong, that sounds awesome! But it’s also taking an innocent pleasure and turning it into a commercial activity replete with lines, rules and credit card transactions. Sorry, but it ain’t the same. 

I probably sound like an old man grousing about the rush to modernity in all aspects of life and recalling fondly lost youth, but I really do think there’s something to the unpretentiousness of some things from the past. Maybe sledding isn’t about cheap thrills or good times with the grandkids so much as it is about harkening back to simpler and more comforting times. And I suspect that’s something that resonates with people of all ages, regardless of their proximity to a slippery slope.

Tony Jones' column "Everything in Moderation" publishes biweekly on Thursdays in the Summit Daily News. Jones is a veteran of the IT industry and has worked in the public and private sectors. He lives part-time in Summit County and Denver. Contact him at eimsummit@gmail.com.