Blog #7

For several years, my family and I owned a condo up in Canmore in three sisters village. Across the highway from where our condo was, there was a hill that my mom took my brother and me every time that we went up there. The hill was incredibly steep and went up about a kilometer or so. In retrospect, I am surprised that my mother let my brother and I go on it at all considering the environment of the hill. The left half of the hill was for the most part flat, but the right half had multiple ramps and jumps that propelled some people an excess of 5 feet into the air if they hit it straight on. I usually kept to the left side of the hill, but on the last run of the day (go figure) I went down the left side of the hill but about half way down the hill, a little kid about three or four years old stepped out from the treeline that lined the hill. I put my left foot out from the toboggan and pushed myself away from him, but straight into the right side of the hill and into the path of the largest jump on the hill. Normally I would have endured the jump and hoped for the best, but as fate would have it, someone happened to have wiped out right in front of the jump and was just standing there as if he were the only person on the hill. Rapidly approaching, I yelled at him, but he didn’t hear me because of the helmet that he was wearing. With no other option other than plow into the man and risk injury myself, I threw myself off the side of the sled and rolled another 10 feet or so before I even slowed down. The sled hit the jump, missing the oblivious idiot standing at the base of the jump as if nothing had happened. With a hot head, I stormed down the hill grabbed my sled and stormed back to the car. Although I was angry at the time, in retrospect, it was kind of a fun and memorable experience.