Ice slides

The winter is coming here, so it’s a good time to tell about our traditional fun thing that we have during winters.
In my place, we don’t have lack of snow, on contrary, we have as much of it that we like to utilize the excessive amount of it for anything.

But if you just crude those piles of snow on the curb, the roads start to look like long corridors or trenches.

The municipality has to find another way to use that snow. They try different ways.
They build sculptures and ice towns for decoration. For some reason, we call those sculptures as “small forms”.

They build ice slides for fun, and people do like them.

They transfer snow to the special snow polygons out of the city.
But it’s related only to public, municipal, and federal places. For other places, we have to solve those problems on our own.

For instances, many groups of children in my boys’ kindergarten have their own places to walk. And the snow is a problem there as well.
As part of my volunteer job, every year I take care of those snow for those lands.
It’s too boring for me just transfer the snow somewhere, and because I can remember how much I loved those ice slides – I always construct those sliders.
It takes a few days of work for me because ice needs some time to get strength structure.

I start from making a big pile of snow, much larger than ice sliders would be.
Then I form the ladder to top, and the slope.
It’s the most laborious part of the work, and it takes 5 or more hours of my efforts.

Then starts the easiest part, I have to gradually pour the construction with water. I use long pipe connected to central water supply. It’s easy, I don’t have to do any hard physical work, but it’s really time-consuming.

I can’t pour too much water because snow will melt too active and form holes, and I have to do it layer by layer to make ice strong enough for children’s sleds.

Sometimes if I make mistake with water, I have to stop and add some snow to the place where I made that mistake.

Also, I have to make pauses up to half-hour (depend on the temperature outside) to wait for transformation water to ice.

It’s a long work, but seeing how children happy using it is rewarding enough.