Sledding the Fern Hollow Chute

Like skiers of the backcountry, serious sledders assess a wooded slope for the optimal ride. We scan the slope for a continuous tree-free course from top to bottom because when you’re sledding, trees can really get in the way. In 1990, a tree fell on the slope into Fern Hollow in just the right spot. The lucky kids in the neighborhood were treated to Mother Nature’s most perfectly designed sled riding hill ever.

There was one pathway into Fern Hollow that had no obstructions, and halfway down that pathway was a 10-foot long flat spot. The big oak tree dropped right at the edge. To the untrained eye, it was a dead tree in the woods. But to the children who lived in the neighborhood, it would be a natural event more important than the Steelers winning the Super Bowl.

We looked forward to riding the Fern Hollow chute all year, and after the first snow of the season, we had to spend a day getting it ready. We piled snow on the uphill side of the dead tree, creating a ramp. Then, the chute itself needed to be carved into a mostly straight, continuous groove with sled-guiding berms, bobsled-style. All day long we dragged sleds piled high with snow to the chute. Like miners we robbed most of the park of useable snow.

Then we moved on to safety.

The Fern Hollow chute was double-black diamond, class 5 sled riding. Snow was piled up at the bases of the two trees lining the steep landing zone to divert errant sleds. Spotter’s platforms were cut into those piles so that a person could do the redirecting when those errant sleds were airborne.  Spotters redirected manned sleds mid-flight regularly.

Once in action, the chute was simultaneously a stellar snow-engineering feat and a death-defying daredevil act. Not a single parent ever saw the Fern Hollow chute, and for good reason. The sled of choice – an enormous innertube from a tractor trailer wheel – made for a softer, safer run.

A run down the chute started high up on the hillside. After swallowing all sensibility and summoning all the courage he could, the sledder would lay head-first, belly-down on the tube. There was no controlling the tube as it accelerated down the chute, and there were no brakes. By the time the sledder reached the flat spot, tears were streaming down his face from speed though the cold air. Then, with no grace whatsoever, the speeding tube would launch off the ramp over the dead tree just as the hillside dropped from underneath.

Everybody was silent as the tube/boy flying object soared. The only sound was the crystalline spattering of snow flecks hitting trees and hard-packed snow. Spotters stood ready.

The hillside below the dead tree was at least 25 feet long, very steep, and perfect for landing such a craft in these conditions. However, long flights at high elevations packed a devil of a landing, and novice sledders often bounced right off the tube upon impact. Eventually, we all knew to hold on with a death grip.

At the bottom of the slope, the Fern Hollow chute emptied into a field devoid of trees and other obstructions. After flight, the sledder could relax in a 40-inch diameter bed of inflated rubber and breathe easily as the tube slowly came to a stop. But, nobody ever sat for long because the next guy couldn’t wait to get his turn on the tube.

The chute was never run on anything other than the innertube; it would be suicide. Plastic sleds were much faster, most likely launching the sledder into the treetops. Then, the landing would be too harsh without the plush shock-absorbing tube.

Winter after winter the Fern Hollow chute gained notoriety and fame in the neighborhood. Little brothers and younger neighbors were groomed into the chute building efforts after training and then, only after they’d witnessed several runs, were given the go-ahead to sled. Any kid who suggested that they need to first ask a parent was shunned.

The chute lived on for several years, and while on winter break from college, many came back to ride it. Or, as in my case, if you went to a local college, the chute was a perfect way to show your out-of-town college buddies how tough we were around here, which worked for most guys.

Except for Teddy.

One winter day, after a sled riding session at the Fern Hollow chute, I told my friend, Mike, about it. Mike, in turn, told me about Teddy.

Teddy was not soft and fuzzy, but short and stocky. He looked like Tom Cruise. He wasn’t cocky or arrogant or confrontational; he was friendly and very, very energetic. And, he was known as the most gonzo and serious sled rider ever.

Everybody loved Teddy’s enthusiasm. Mike introduced me to Teddy, “This guy wants to ride your sled hill.”

“Yeah? We can go tomorrow.”

And so I arranged to bring Teddy to the Fern Hollow chute.

“What’s he going to do with that?” asked the regulars when they saw Teddy walking to the chute carrying his plastic sled.

“I tried to warn him,” I said, and figured he’d abandon it after witnessing one run down the chute.

“This is my sled,” Teddy said. “I’ve been riding it since I was a kid. They don’t make them like this anymore.”

Teddy showed off the sled, a blue hollow-form plastic sled with black handles on the side. The handles had levers that would drag in the snow when he pulled on them. Pull one to steer, two to brake.

“Dude, you’re nuts if you’re going to ride the chute on that thing. You’ll fly right over the spotters!”

This was actually not a ridiculous concept. Because of the steep hill after the launch log, the first spotter was well below the top of the ramp and sledders with good runs would often soar past at chest-level.

“Let’s see what you guys have got here,” Teddy responded innocently.

After seeing a few runs of the chute on tubes by regulars, Teddy was visibly excited. “I can’t believe that tree! You couldn’t have asked for a more perfectly placed log!”

We all smiled proudly, as if we had something to do with the placement.

Teddy joined in and ran the chute on the innertube with us a few times. He worked the safety chain: after his turn sledding, he was the bottom spotter. Then, he moved up to first spotter. Then, he stood at the log to make sure sledders were on course going into the ramp. Lastly, he was on deck and held the tube for the sledder. All the while, he passed the tube up to the next position in the chain, until it was his turn.

Finally, Teddy had seen enough.

“This tube is too slow. And, the chute could start much higher up this hill; up by that tree. That way you’d have more speed going into the ramp. This is going to be awesome!”

We stared at him, each of us thinking one of two things: this guy is going to kill himself, or, who invited Richard Petty to the soap box derby?

I was thinking the former, that Teddy was about to be its first casualty and began to worry about what would happen after somebody died while sledding the Fern Hollow chute. I tried to make peace with this being our last day on the chute. It would surely be outlawed.

“Woo-hoo!!” screeched one of the younger, less experienced regulars. “Let’s do it! Let’s make the chute higher!”

For some reason, we all decided to pitch in and build the chute higher for Teddy.

“See, now we don’t need anybody to hold the sled!” cried Teddy from the new chute origin as he held onto the only tree preventing him from making it even longer. “This is gonna be sick!”

Everybody scrambled into safety positions. Spotters held their positions at the trees. Two of us stood at the ramp to keep Teddy on course.

“3 – 2 – 1 – here goes!”

Teddy sprang to his feet and jumped high and far down the chute, giving himself even more speed. Everybody who had ever run the chute had done so from a stand-still, 20 feet lower on the hill, on a cushy, fat inner tube. Richard Petty was here indeed.

About five seconds later, Teddy had sledded himself into neighborhood folklore. He approached the launch log perfectly without even a touch of steering from the sled’s black handles. He sped up the snow ramp effortlessly, unlike the innertube which lost momentum there, but his sled angled slightly just as it took flight. Then, as predicted, Teddy soared over as the spotters looked up at him.

But Teddy had a slight angle to the left coming off the lip. So, he worked hard mid-flight to correct it, pumping his sled to the right, away from his outstretched body, in an attempt to change course. His attempts were unsuccessful. Time slowed as we watched Teddy fly out of control, struggling and twisting.

When Teddy landed, only half of his body was on the sled and he had overshot the entire landing zone. As he descended from the stratosphere, he lifted his head up high to keep it away from the sled. He landed hard onto the flat field, which was covered in snow packed down from run after run and his face slammed into the snowpack. Because he was not completely on the sled, the hard edge of it smashed into his sternum before he rolled off.

Everything was quiet. We had just witnessed the most spectacular feat in sled riding history, but unfortunately our new hero was laying face down. We waited. Then, moaning. Motion.

Teddy rolled on to his back and lifted his torso. Blood covered the lower half of his face and was running down his neck onto his coat. He put his hand up to his chin and looked down at the blood on his glove. He held his bruised chest with his other hand.

“Oh yeah!” he shouted in a voice much lower than normal, drawing it out at the end, and raised a fist into the air. We cheered, whooped, and hollered for Teddy and ran down to pat him on the back.

Then, as the chest thumping subsided, Teddy looked down at his sled. Long fingers of blue plastic crossed at the edge, where Teddy’s chest had crushed it to splinters. I smiled with a bit of pride. Richard Petty’s car couldn’t handle our track.            

As Teddy walked away from the Fern Hollow chute, he dragged behind him his useless, broken sled. Nobody ever ran the Fern Hollow chute on a plastic sled again.

SLAG

There’s nothing romantic about slag. At least, that is, not in the material itself. It is a far cry from a precious stone, not even useful like coal. In Pittsburgh’s era of steel, the city found itself with more of this byproduct of the steelmaking process than it could handle. It was discarded into mountains alongside the Monongahela River, right across from the Homestead Works. For decades the heaps of hard packed gravel-like substance have remained; a barren industrial wasteland of unnatural peaks and little vegetation.

In 1986 I was twelve years old. Like every boy with a penchant for exploratory adventure, it was my turn to do my own survey of the slag heaps.

It was like the Wild West. A dry, empty landscape with no rules. Who owned the slag dumps? Nobody knew. I took my first tour of the slags with Jay Cravotta, a kid much tougher than me. Our fathers were close friends so I trusted he wouldn’t ditch me back in the no-man’s-land on the other side of the big fences posted with NO TRESPASSSING signs. Brian Cusick was with us, too, who probably fit my category better than Jay’s. We were both nerdy, scrawny glasses wearers with just enough of a sense of adventure to ride our bikes past those signs. Jay tolerated us, I’m sure.

Jay told us about the “hole,” which he described no further than that: a huge hole in the ground. I was imaging flames of eternal damnation licking at the edges. Pedaling our bikes across the sometimes packed, sometimes granular slag, we passed burned out cars, twisted girders, train car axels, and heavy cable, completely ignorant of the risk of laceration, infection, or falling. We were on an adventure, with no more sensibility than our adolescence would allow.

At the foot of one of the larger heaps, we dropped our bikes and began a crawling ascent up a 40 degree pitch. Jay told us that the hole was at the top. Loose slag rolled down the slope and created harmless little avalanches. At the top we stood at the edge of a pretend volcano with dozens of discarded tires instead of molten rock.

Quite disappointed, I began to fabricate my own tall tales of the hole as we slid back down on our bums. My mind was already making the hole into a bigger deal than it was.

We continued deeper into the barren slag wild. All around us were peaks. Beyond them, our imaginations told us, was unknown territory for us to explore. We came to a small stream devoid of signs of life. A bridge – a mesh of railroad ties and iron – was no longer in use but stood before us as the most exciting way across. We could not ride over the bridge on our bikes. That would be suicide because gaping splinter-lined holes gave way to a 20-foot drop to the creek below. In some places, brittle, rotten plywood covered the holes, but only made passage appear to be even more treacherous. We scampered across, pushing our bikes, sometimes walking on one railroad tie while pushing the small pedal bike across another.

As we rode away from the bridge and into a drainage ravine that winded its way to the top of another huge slag pile, all three of us were silent. The sounds around us were manmade, unnatural. Cars purred across a highway bridge in the distance. A train slowly chugged along the banks of the river below us. A tugboat heaved a load of barges to market downriver. We were, after all, not in the Wild West, but on a heap of gravel overlooking the Mon River and the Parkway East. Our bike chains squeaked and our tires crunched as they searched for traction.

At the top of the incline we stood on a vast lunar plateau. Post-apocalyptic scenery was everywhere: burned and rusted vehicles, mattresses, furniture, and appliances. Evidence told us of huge bonfires with dozens of participants sitting on seats improvised from wood, TVs, washing machines, upholstered furniture, or chunks of slag itself. The thought of the place blazing at night was simultaneously exciting and terrifying.

We rode the moonscape for hours. Exploring every corner for artifacts meant riding up and over berms, ramps, and mounds – all made of slag and littered with junk. Our bravery began to increase as we jumped over broken metal and fire pits.

Before long we were exhausted and ready to make our descent. It was wild and dangerous, down a V-shaped ravine that presumably drained the plateau after it rained. Helmets were uncool and generally not available in these days, which made the “Babyhead” sized rocks that were everywhere as we flew down the ravine even more dangerous.

We approached the river and found the mythical Skeetersville. Several dozen homes, and nothing more, make up this small village trapped between the Monongahela, Nine Mile Run, and the slag heaps. In my 12-year old mind, Skeetersville residents had no reasonable way out. They had to either wade through the creek, walk across the train bridge over the creek, or hike through the slags to get to civilization. That each home had a driveway with a car in it never enlightened me with reality. We rode through town like young guns.

Then we did something really stupid.

From Skeetersville, we biked along a pair of railroad tracks, which cross Nine Mile Run on a narrow bridge. It is a short bridge and the acoustics were telling us there was no train nearby, other than the one that was standing stationary on the second set of tracks. And so, as stupid adolescent boys have done since the dawn of humanity, we pushed our luck. Imagine it: three kids crossing a train bridge on their BMX bikes. One track is empty, the other in use by a rusty stack of freight cars that hadn’t moved in decades. The width of the bridge: wide enough to hold two sets of tracks, no more. What happens next in this story? Of course, a freight train barrels down the tracks at the three kids.

We escaped death by locomotive not by outrunning it a la Stand By Me, but by tossing our bikes and then our bodies underneath the massive stationary train and laying down. In retrospect, we should have jumped off the trestle into the creek and simply risked injury. There I laid, looking down between planks at the creek. Two feet in front of my nose, thousands of tons of freight train thundered past, car after car. The noise was deafening and the bridge shook like it was about to give. All I could see from my position was the bottom half of the wheels of the monster as it rolled past. The train went on forever, and I cried. Fortunately nobody saw or heard. I don’t remember anything else about that day, not even how I got home.

Twenty-five years later I am a frequent slag heap visitor. Half of the region – the post-apocalyptic lunar plateau – has become a development. Apparently a clever engineering firm figured out how to build homes on top of slag. The other half is now home to some of the best mountain biking this side of Moab. Or, at least this side of Skeetersville.

Git R Dun!