Tubing, or 'the way sledging always should have been', or 'sliding very fast down a hill on a rubber ring'

So, tubing.

I'd never heard of tubing until i came to Canada, although i'm assured that it does exist elsewhere. Tubing is basically all the good bits of sledging, without having to walk up the hill inbetween. Win.

The basic premise is that you get a large rubber ring, with some plastic covering the bottom, then you go to a specifically designed tubing park and slide. How you slide is, to a certain extent, a matter of taste. But in the author's lowly opinion, you can also test the mettle of the given mountain by their tubing policy. For example, at Cypress you sit in the tube and slide down the track spinning a little as you go. At Seymour, on the other hand, the advise is to hold the two handles infront of you, lie on the tube and slide down head first, preferably as fast as you can muster...

What. Awesome. Fun.

The way the tracks at Seymour are set up it also looks a lot like you would simply go flying off into Vancouver if you were to overshoot the end. (You wouldn't, incidently - one of my friends is the Snow Play supervisior and has the enviable job of going tubing each morning to set the start gate heights so that this doesn't happen).

So we went tubing the other day and tried it out for the first time. I must say i was a little nervous when i actually picked up my tube and headed to the starting gate - it starts to look awfully steep and hard. However, one time is all it takes. You go whizzing down the track at ever increasing speed, until you start to think that you really are going terribly fast, at which point you go flying up the slope on the other side slide back down backwards and find yourself lying onto of your tube in a heap in the snow.

The best is still top come though. Once at the bottom, all you have to do is wander over to the side of the track with your tube, sit in your tube, be clipped onto the tow and be pulled back up the hill. Awesome.