Where to Hit the Slopes:
The Ultimate Sledding Review Guide
More by Chris Janson
NEIRAD enilno edition
There’s no doubt about it—this January we got hammered. I’ve lived in Darien since the day I was brought home from Stamford Hospital, and I never remember there being so much snow. My parents say the blizzard of ’95 came close, but I wouldn’t bet on it. The downside: a Russian-roulette-style approach to mid-term exam scheduling. The upside: a whole lot of sledding.
In at least my own social circle, I know sledding is still an extremely popular and especially beloved winter pastime. When the snow comes, as it has this January, we are always eager to hit the slopes. But the question is always where? This is Connecticut. It’s pretty flat here. Do we actually have any good local runs? To answer this question, I set out with some friends and family and “tested” six hills that I’ve heard about through the grapevine. Here are my results:
Baker Field: The Bunny Slope (Green Circle)
The main slope of Baker field, a hot-spot for the young at heart
Reputation: “It’s where I’ve sledded since when I was a kid, and there are always a lot of people from my neighborhood there...” - senior Stephanie Winsch
Baker Field is a happy little park on Noroton Avenue, containing a tiny playground, a little league diamond, and, most importantly for our purposes, a gentle hill that eases out into a long field. It is a favorite winter romping ground of the neighborhood’s many younger families, and consequently one of the busiest spots in town. On a trip here, be prepared to say hello to at least two families you’ve babysat.
Duration of Ride: 7-10 seconds. Only because you’re going so slowly.
Pitch: Not too steep. If three year olds can take this hill with no fear, than you know its simple stuff.
Jump Ability: How high can your legs push you? As the hill is only a couple dozen yards of lazy decline, with no real contours that dip or peak, jumps must be built by hand about halfway down the pitch. The only way to obtain any legitimate speed by this point is to wear a jet pack or have hard-hitting Darren Sharper push you, so unless you jerk up with your knees, the sensation will be only slightly more exhilarating than going over a speed bump. This assumes you don’t take the left bank...more about that next.Notable Features: With a parking lot directly behind the slope, plows create large banks at the very “top” of the hill. To extend your ride by a couple of meters, you can start from atop one of these. For the best ride, however, walk past the little grove of trees at the edge of the bunny slope to find what I called above the left bank: a slightly steeper pitch wedged between a cement stairway and stone wall ledge. This trail has the slightest fragrance of Red Bull, whereas the other slope reeks of Gerber. You can go off the adjacent ledge if you feel like it, but I don’t recommend it. Neither does your chiropractor. There is no hope of a jump here, only a guaranteed spine-shaking plop off it. The stairway is lame too. Don’t bother trying to conquer it, you’ll only scratch your sled.
Crowd: As established, a lot of your littlest neighbors. A lot of them. Like a lot.
Recommended Sled: Anything tiny, maybe one of those saucer-like things. It’s not worth dragging anything bigger. Bring some carrots and a top hat too, it would probably be more fun to forget the sledding and build a snowman.
Waveny Park: Local Legend (Green Circle)
View from the bottom of the hill at Waveny, with snow-blanketed tree branches hanging overhead
Reputation: “Waveny? That one’s supposed to be really good, right?”–Francesca Milewski
Right across the border with New Canaan is situated the vast Waveny Park. Hidden behind the castle that is Waveny Manor is a hill popularly heralded as the best in the region (by about half of the peole in town, the other half seems to have never heard about it). Here are the facts between the lines of hype:
Duration of Ride: Long. Maybe 15-25 seconds, if you ride the hill all the way down.
Pitch: Relatively gentle. Steepness is not Waveny’s asset. What makes this hill a good ride is it’s long, uninterrupted slope, not any measurable angle.
Jump Ability: Not very many opportunities here. On the upper stretches of this relatively flat hill, little mounds of snow don’t amount to much. What I’ve seen work are bumps down to the lower-right, where the hill steepens a little bit. You can’t really aim for these from up top; instead you must start about 2/3 of the way down to hit them, sacrificing speed for accuracy. With this, you get air equivalent to Town Hall in a best case scenario.
Notable Features: I’ve already alluded to the shape of this mammoth hill. Waveny’s slope can be divided into two zones or two runs: to the left is a very gentle slope that provides an easy warm up run. To the right is a steeper part of the hill that also extends longer. There is a large tree about 2/3 of the way down the hill that serves as a marker between the two. Past the tree, the left part ends pretty quickly while the right part goes on to take a steeper plunge towards a pond. Don’t worry, the town intelligently put hay bales in the way of your path, keeping you dry and alive. In this little section there is almost always a little chute carved out into the hill, sort of like a curvy-little slide. It provides an entertaining ride in itself. Way to the right is another field. It funnels down into a maintenance road that winds back to the base of the popular Waveny hill. Don’t bother with this one. It’s not very steep and the snow is never packed, so you end up going nowhere. Also avoid riding from up by the mansion down towards the main hill. The drop off the cement wall is not worth the extension to the ride.
Crowd: Waveny is usually pretty busy with sledders of all ages, young and old, a lot from Darien. The hill is so dang big, though, that there’s always space for everybody. Just be careful not to run over some toddler you didn’t see at first.
Recommended Sled: If you have one of those fake snowboards, this is where you should bring it. The long ride actually recreates the mountain experience relatively well. You will even see people on skis here, and it’s a great place to learn how to use them if you never have before. I discourage disks here, because they’re impossible to steer, and most likely you’ll spin out before you reach the bottom.
Town Hall: Pleasant Surprise (Green Circle)
A massive jump on the hill at this little-known sledding spot
Reputation: “It’s a pretty nice hill, as long as you watch out for the cars”–junior Natalie Metz.
I had never heard about the hill at Town Hall until this winter. When I first did, I assumed that it was just the hill at the nearby big cemetery with all the No Sledding signs, and wrote the spot off as a lost cause. However, my trip to Town Hall was my most pleasant surprise. Here’s why:
Duration of ride: 7-10 Seconds, same as Baker but over a longer run and at a faster pace.
Pitch: A very respectable 40-45 degrees, not intimidating but not messing around either. Steepest towards the left.
Jump Ability: Pretty decent. I stumbled upon a couple of mounds halfway down the hill during my visit. There was enough room leading up to them to get some good speed, permitting some brief hang-time. It won’t shoot you to the moon, but should satisfy your craving for air pretty well.
Notable Features: This one’s all about the parking lot. The hill at Town Hall is the strip of berm in between the building’s top car entrance, where you were dropped off for dances in middle school, and the parking lot of the lower entrance below. The slope literally feeds straight into this. Thank God for plows, who push their till of H2O(s) right up to the edge of the lot, providing a barrier that ranges from about one to six feet tall. In places this makes for perfect safety, and in others it makes for a good jump into the flow of traffic. Furthermore, there are some holes in the wall that let straight into the lot. Beware of parked and crossing cars. To be fair, it only takes half a brain to avoid all danger by bailing at the last second. I also found this hill to be the quaintest or prettiest of them all, with a view of the park across the street and a general atmosphere of solitude.
Crowd: Pretty quiet. Almost no one, except a few scattered fellow sledders and student drivers, bothers visiting the Town Hall on a Sunday morning or snow day. It’s a nice, quiet place to pass a lazy winter weekend.
Recommended Sled: Anything small in which you can easily bail.
Witch Lane Park: Flume of Black Magic (Blue Square)
The dingy look of the hill at first glance belies its actual intensity
Reputation: This one’s really steep. There are always little kids there, but there are never any annoying sophomores”–junior Michael Palmer
Witch Lane Park is a little public space just over the line with Rowayton. Don’t judge this spot on looks alone; this initially dinky-looking hill actually provides a fast paced and slightly dangerous sledding experience.
Duration of Ride: 5-15, depending on where you fall. You can hit a bad bump early on and wipe out up top very easily, but if you survive the top of the hill you can ride it out for a good ways.
Pitch: This hill is less a linear line with a negative M value than a complex piecewise function. To the right is a relatively long and steady slope that shoots you down between some trees. To the left are a series of steep, narrow chutes that abruptly meet with a flat platform that in turn collapses into another hill. These windy, up-and-down gullies constitute a roller-coaster ride if I’ve ever been on one.
Jump Ability: Fantastic. Amazing. The best in the region bar none. The choppy nature of the slope, with a ton of natural drop-offs, makes building the perfect jump an easy task. Pile some snow at the edge of the platform, which is incidentally cement under the snow and the added boost to the natural jump will send you soaring. With the rapid speed you attain en route to your jump, you can get a solid couple seconds to look down, talk to God, or do whatever else you feel like doing in midair. Push off a little with your legs while you’re going over for maximum effect. Fair warning: the landing might hurt the next morning, if not on the spot.
Notable Features: Combine the steepness of the hill and its forest topography–mostly dirt, little grass–and you get a very thin coat of snow. Whatever lands on the ground, and not the branches, gets scraped off very quickly under standard levels of use. The upside is that the slippery, thin coating sends you rocketing down the hill, but the downside is it’s almost impossible to get back up. Also, when it’s warm, you get a lot of mud. One attempt to ride the hill in early march after a light storm left me riding on pure brown sludge the whole time. It worked, but it was a little messy. Beware of rocks and surprise gullies too. This is a fun hill, but relatively harsh in places.
Crowd: There are always locals around, but never to a stifling extent.
Recommended Sled: Definitely bring something long and flat that you could lie down, ie your standard Blade Runner. This kind of sled is absolutely necessary to enjoy the hill’s jumps to their max potential. Saucers and other small sleds are hard to steer through the gullies to the jumps; not to mention they hurt even more to land on. Snowboards, surprisingly, don’t work to well here either, as it’s hard to start a ride with them on the hill’s slippery top.
DHS: The Secret Hiding Right Under Your Nose
(Blue Square/Black Diamond)
Few people think to look here, but the back of D building boasts a formidable hill
Reputation: “We have a hill here? Where?”—junior Holden Chung
This is another one I’d never visited in my childhood travels. Some friends told me about this one last year. The DHS hill is right behind the main gym, hidden behind the D building.
Duration of Ride: 7-8 light speed seconds. Hold onto your hats.
Pitch: This one might give you vertigo the first time you take it. It looks ridiculously steep from the top. It’s probably the steepest one covered in this article.
Jump Ability: I would have thought there would have been a ton of jumps at this hill, but there were only one or two small ones over to the sides. Going down the slope, I found the ground steering my sled completely away from these. This goes for the whole hill–paths are narrow and take you down specific routes. A jump would have to be placed perfectly to really work. My sample size was small, but I was left with a feeling of slight disappointment with the jumping conditions at DHS.
Notable Features: I’d say the trees. The hill at DHS is a veritable tree trail, a mine field, a crash course up top. These divide the hill into the aforementioned paths, which are mostly equal in terms of pitch and speed. Wherever you start, watch out for the bottom of the hill. There is a definitive shortage of flat space at the end of the run, which turns almost instantly from slant to flat stretch to plastic fence. Go through this and you’re lost in the woods. Perfectly executed bailing is key, as you want to stay on your board long enough to enjoy the full ride but not long enough to crash.
Crowd: This place is very secluded, and doesn’t get heavy traffic. It might be the quietest hill of all reviewed.
Recommended Sled: Like with Town Hall, I’d go with anything you feel comfortable bailing from.
MMS: Trail Closed.
I had heard rumors about people going sledding at MMS, so I set out with my sister, a current 8th grader, to investigate. To my disappointment, I discovered that this myth is one that needs busting. There is no good hill at MMS. I was told to look behind the school, near the senior center, for a hill, but the only things there were two buildings and the lower field.
My Rankings
5) Baker: It’s a good childhood memory, but doesn’t cut it for the high school crowd
4&3) Tie between Darien High School and Darien Town Hall: This one was a toss up for me. The DHS hill is a monster-fast run, but then again it’s nestled in the spot of our daily grind. Do I want to spend my time off back at the high school? I much prefer the ambience of Town Hall, which compensates for its gentler hill.
2) Waveny: Don’t get me wrong, this one is a great hill. You can’t go wrong with Waveny. But just because it’s the biggest doesn’t mean it’s the best. I love Waveny’s long slope, but don’t like how far it is from my own neighborhood and many other parts of Darien. Unless you can drive yourself there, it’s a chore to coordinate whose parent will drive the gang to the hill on each end. I’ve also almost frozen to death there twice, but that’s probably my own fault and my own personal bias speaking. Honestly, my biggest qualm is that the pitch is so gentle. Even with the hill’s unrivaled length, it is too flat to satisfy my need for speed.
1) Witch Lane Park: I love this little hill. It has character. It’s not famous or popular, but consistently delivers all the same. With the best air in the group and some rocket-fast runs, I think it’s the most exciting hill of the bunch. I highly recommend giving it a try next time we get a storm.
