Alaska Winter Games

When I was a kid in Anchorage, way back in 1968, everyone at school had the standard playground equipment in the school yard. All of the play systems where used extensively by all of the grades. Because of the fact that there was ice on the ground nine months out of the year, this meant that everything we played on was usually ice coated. This also meant that there were a certain amount of frozen tongues that had to be rescued by a teacher with warm water due to one of my playmates trying to test the theory that a wet tongue would in freeze to a metallic cold surface. As snow bound kids, we developed new and fun ways to exploit the playground by using ice.

One game we played, which was great fun, was using the frozen slide to surf down. You would sit on your feet, slide down the metal decline and see how far you would keep going down an icy trail that at the time seemed to extend hundreds of feet but was probably only twenty feet long beyond the slide. Sometimes we would build up the snow and ice so that there wasn't a clear point where the ground started and the metal ended. The winner (who didn't win anything) was the kid that went the greatest distance. Obviously this is not a recommended way to use metal slides in the winter, but it fascinated us to no end. I actually had especially slippery shoes that I would risk walking to school in so that I would slide farther once my feet hit the ground. Because all of us were ice skaters, we had reasonably good balance and coordination and by some miracle, no one was ever hurt.

Of course, we also had another popular attraction called "the school ice rink" which gave us all of that coordination and daredevil spirit. To make the ice rink, a school bulldozer would flatten a large circular area and build up dirt and snow banks. Then a huge (it seemed huge to us) fire hose would be utilized to fill the ice rink with the many gallons of water need to make a good surface. Ice skating was one of the main courses of entertainment for us during recess and lunch and by the time we got home from school, we were starving and ready for dinner.

I am one of those people that can say I walked a mile or two to school in the freezing snow, but it was always a fun time. From snow ball fights which required some of us to make it through gauntlets of flying balled up snow and ice to diving into the many huge snow banks that the street crews produced in clearing the streets. Some were so large and we were so light in weight that we actually used to dig tunnels in the snow banks to make fake escape routes. Then there was the beauty of it all that sometimes gets lost on someone that lives there but is revived endlessly in spirit through the years in memories of frozen afternoons and crusty footprints.