Sledding evening

Extraordinary beautiful weather the last days, and still lots of snow in Oslo, Norway. Now that we've passed spring equinox and we have enabled DST, there is still lots of daylight after regular office hours, and possible to do activities. This Monday I collected the sleds I could find and took the youngest children out searching for a suitable hill, we ended up in the hill between two kinder gardens - Grorud barnehage and Ammerudlia barnehage.

Now, ~10 years ago they had some issues with too many children in the area, so they threw up this "temporary" kinder garden shown below (cheap solution, the kindergarden is made from stacked-up ready-made barrack boxes) in the middle of the sledding hill. This degrades the hill slightly, but the hillside is pretty wide, so it's still possible to go tobogganing without hitting the kinder garden. However, the kids in the photograph above didn't really get it, they sledded down a little bit then did an emergency brake maneuver to stop before the fence. I was quite worried they would manage to hurt themselves.

I was googling a bit to see if there had been many fatal accidents in Korketrekkeren a while ago, and found ... none. I found that there had been some minor accident there some years ago, under adverse conditions. However, I did read about a death accident on some other sledding hill in Oslo. The municipality states that Korketrekkeren is the only hill they care about, any sledding anywhere else, and people are doing it completely on their own responsibility.

My 4 years old daughter had some sled with a steering wheel and it was easy to control, the problem was just that she didn't care looking much beyond her own nose tip. There was a lamp post in the middle of the hill, there was the kinder garden (with the fence), the walkway below the hill (a steep and sudden downhill down to the the asphalt), this manhole cover (it doesn't look that bad from this photo, but it was pretty bad - not visible from the distance and deeper than what it looks at the photo), and a bench sticking up from the snow.

Especially the lamp post could be dangerous, it may be pretty bad to hit the head into it at great speed - and my daughter did have some close calls indeed.

I'm sure the kids was enjoying the activity, but I didn't quite like it. Sure, we're riding on our own responsibility, but the municipality shouldn't make the hill more dangerous than what it is. Also, I realized our equipment is rather old and run-down. Also, I desperately needed to pee ... the kids could easily pee there, but there are no places here where it's appropriate for a grown-up man to pee.

All photos available on IPFS QmaaeLDxmRiugqedCdTopS6BGgzH1ZqXbvgHthjw4UBxsp. License: CC BY-SA 4.0