BILLINGS – We’re on the melt here in the city limits. Snow-packed streets are now turning into slush.
But the large amount of snow Billings got this winter means some neighborhood kids are pretty happy.
Nate Oneil, his little brother Payton, and the rest of the neighborhood crew have been building a snow hill in their parents front yard since Christmas .
“Probably six years ago my dad started building little snow hills for us to sled on. Then we found these snowboards at Scheels then we got them and then we started snowboarding down it, Nate Oneil said. “Then we just kept expanding. This is the first year we’ve kind of taken up the whole yard.”
It wasn’t like it was all work and no play, though.
“We would build for an hour, hour and a half. Get bored. Shred for like 15 minutes, then go back and add some more,” Colin Dunn said.
The boys worked tirelessly bringing snow from all over the neighborhood just to have a little fun in the cold.
“So on the sides of the streets we would pile it up into piles and we would take a toboggan and fill the toboggan up and bring it over here and dump it,” Nate Oneil said. “We repeated that for hours and hours on end. It just built up, it was a lot of work.”
But the boys did have some bumps in the road on their way to an awesome place for sledding.
“Well, when the plow came by there were these huge snow hills on the side of the road,” said Gradey Dunn. “Our shovels couldn’t scoop that. So we had to use a wooden shovel.”
Walking to your car in the parking lot can be a challenge when it’s below zero, but don’t tell these guys that. They would often work for long hours after the sun went down, all to put some finishing touches on the hill.
“It was really cold outside. We had to bundle up like a few layers,” Nick Johnson said. And from that period of like four to eleven at night sometimes we would work we would have about three or four breaks.”
For every thrill of landing a solid 180, there’s bound to be a few spills along the way.
“The first time we put it in almost on Christmas I fell, and hurt my side,” Payton Oneil said. “I got a big bump. And then I didn’t do it for about three weeks but now I love it.”
This all seems like a lot of time and effort for something like snowboarding. Some may call them crazy, but it sure looks like an awful lot of fun.
