The toboggan is to Canadian winters what the canoe is to the summer, a humble pleasure that evokes our collective history. But it has never been granted the Olympian dignity of hockey or skating, or of European rivals such as the luge. ANTHONY REINHART quests for tobogganing's soul in a year when a snowy hill can be hard to find.

The hill at Lakeside Park was a mountain to eight-year-old eyes, and it was never more majestic than when the air was cold, the snow fresh and the toboggan waxed.

With little effort, I can reach back 30 years and retrieve the sensations from those moonlit nights and blinding weekend afternoons in Kitchener, Ont. -- freedom, elation, frozen toes, bruised tailbone, but no fear that I can remember.

So I'm a bit surprised, shivering in the falling snow east of Bancroft, Ont., to find myself negotiating with God at the entrance to the Rodle Mountain Luge Training Centre.

I'm here to slide down the home track of three-time Olympic competitor Clay Ives, which his father, Paul, carved out of the family's hillside homestead in 1987. And I offer to exchange my non-believer's card for an hour's worth of protection.

University of Calgary students dressed as Mounties take a dry run without toboggans as engineering students from across Canada attended a concrete toboggan competition at Mont Tremblant, Que.
Enlarge Image

University of Calgary students dressed as Mounties take a dry run without toboggans as engineering students from across Canada attended a concrete toboggan competition at Mont Tremblant, Que.

But from above, there's only silence, a silence soon broken, from somewhere unseen behind the trees, by a whoop, a whoosh and a single, shouted word: "Clear!"

Great, I think, they're defibrillating someone -- maybe someone like me, old enough to appreciate danger but still too young to leave it alone.

Pride pushes me up the driveway to a big log house that makes me think of pancakes and syrup, an image that evaporates as Paul Ives turns me back outside to the track. He knows why I'm here, even if I've temporarily forgotten: I'm on a week-long journey into the heart of a great Canadian tradition, tobogganing, the shared national experience of sliding downhill on your bottom, seated on some precarious conveyance of wood or metal or fibreglass or plastic.

My search will uncover the pastime's prehistoric origins and its forgotten Victorian heyday as a rival to the country's other great winter sports. We all know what became of hockey and curling and skating in Canada -- all will grace our TV screens in coming weeks as the Winter Olympics unfold in Turin, Italy. But what of tobogganing? Has it become merely a childish warm-up for fancy foreign innovations such as the luge and bobsleigh?

Such questions will guide me up the highway to Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City and the Laurentians, then back west to Kitchener. What I find makes me wonder if the toboggan really has a future, as apparent climate change leaves hills barren of snow in eerily warm winters. If it does persist, perhaps it will be reincarnated as an "extreme" sport, in the sleek form of a Swiss-made contraption called an Airboard, yours for $300.

All of which I find more appealing to think about than the task at hand.

To be clear, the luge is a European sled, not a Canadian toboggan; it rides on runners, while a toboggan sits flat on the snow. Still, Bancroft was on my northeasterly escape route from snowless Southern Ontario, so why not taste the Olympic heights of snow-riding before digging into its humbler roots?

But as Mr. Ives's 31-year-old son, Jesse, leads me to the track, I suddenly feel I've been taking my subsequent destinations -- including the bottom of the 850-metre luge course -- too much for granted.

I choose a sled and strain to listen, through a chorus of nervous inner voices, to his instructions: Lean back and rest your inner calves against the outside edges of the two flexible runners that curl up at the front.

To turn left, press your right leg inward on the right runner, while extending your left arm behind, hand on the snow, to help guide the sled. To turn right, reverse all of that.

To brake, pull on the rope, or press your feet flat to the track.

Keep your back straight and don't lean into the turns.

Jesse assures me I'll catch on after a few attempts. The only thing I know with certainty is that I look like The Flintstones' Great Gazoo in my bulbous, open-faced, metallic green motorcycle helmet. That and my fear.

I push past it and down the hill, picking up enough speed to blow my mind clear of Jesse's half-heard instructions.

Near the first turn, I squint through a blur of snowflakes the size of marshmallows and size up a disquieting state of affairs. It involves a looming wall of tires and a saddle-type horn made of duct tape, sticking up from the seat between my legs.

Survival trumps instructions. I bail.

When the skidding and bumping stop, when the ice crystals on my face begin to melt and my eyes adjust, I realize several things: I'm a pretty bad slider, and an even worse listener. I need better boots. I'm out of shape.

But, on the plus side, my fear is gone. And I am alive -- somehow, more than I was before.

Of course. How could I have forgotten?

Words of encouragement from Jesse and his dad waft down the hill, but I need none. I brush myself off, collect my sled and trudge back up the hill, childhood nerve restored. After five or six more runs, each with a wipeout but a little smoother than the last, I start at the top and make it to the bottom.

Heart pounding, I yell "clear" to my fellow sliders up above, to let them know it's safe.

Back at the house, Paul and Linda Ives tell me that they didn't foresee, 19 years ago, that their low-tech attraction would lure 300 people a year up their driveway, or that their son would ride a backyard hobby to the Olympics (Clay Ives is a coach in Turin this time around).

At the same time, they're not surprised. "There's a universal appeal to gravity sports," Paul Ives says. "You just have to be human."

It's a safe bet no one was thinking of "gravity sports" when the first "odabaggan" was fashioned out of a couple of hand-hewn boards, bent at the ends between a pair of trees and strung together with moose hide. It was a survival tool for the aboriginal people of Eastern Canada's sub-Arctic forests.

"There's no other way to transport quantities of stuff in the winter woods," says David Morrison, director of archeology and history at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Que. In the absence of horse or gasoline power, "I think it would be as fast as you could go," he says.

While the Inuit used sleds on the hard-packed Arctic snow, their southerly neighbours found odabaggans, with their flat bottoms, worked best. Snowshoes, which emerged around the same time, worked on the same principle.

That said, it wouldn't have taken long for fun to follow function. "Recreational use of toboggans probably dates back to the first guy who made a toboggan," Dr. Morrison says. "You can imagine somebody six or seven thousand years ago, yelling at his kids for breaking his toboggan."

None of this was lost on the early French trappers, who adopted snow-travel technology and winter dress, notably blanket coats, from their native trading partners in the early 1600s.

In time, odabaggan, an Algonquian term -- nobûgidaban in Anishinabe -- became toboggan. Blood mixed, giving rise to the Métis people, whose men adorned their coats with a colourful waist sash, the ceinture flechée. All of which helps to explain the more curious items I find at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, after a dodgy drive on ice-rutted roads from Bancroft.

Archivists Beth Greenhorn and Sara Hatton show me an 1870s composite photo by William James Topley, Ottawa's photographer to the elite at the time: Titled The Toboggan Party, Rideau Hall, the picture superimposes studio shots of more than two dozen adults, some in blanket coats and sashes and with toboggans at their feet, onto an artificial winter background.

"The fact that people would actually go to studios to pose for photographs on fake hills strikes me as curious," Ms. Greenhorn says. It's tobogganing, for God's sake, not polo.

But in those days, Ms. Hatton reminds, Canada's winter activities -- skating, curling, snowshoeing, tobogganing, even hockey -- were all still amateur pastimes. Hobbies, really. And it was the rich who had time for hobbies, and money for fancy photographs.

The toboggan's golden age, at least in the formal sense, peaked in the 1880s. And it happened under the same storied sporting umbrella that iced the first Stanley Cup champions -- the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association.

The Westmount-based MAAA formed in 1881 as an alliance of the city's existing snowshoe, lacrosse and cycling clubs. With a mandate to provide "rational amusements and recreation for its members," it soon brought hockey, curling, skating, football and other sports, including tobogganing, into the fold.

As I read about the 1884 founding of the MAAA's Tuque Bleue Tobogganing Club, I try to reconcile "rational amusement" with barrelling down a slippery hill on a hard-to-steer vehicle with no brakes. But it turns out tobogganing in well-heeled Anglo Montreal was indeed a rational pursuit: Manicured ice chutes were built into hillsides, or on high wooden frames where the land was flat.

"The Victorians [were] always formal and over-organized," Dr. Morrison says. "Spontaneous fun was not something people of the middle class were supposed to engage in."

There were competitive races in the 1880s, and club members even wore a uniform, borrowed from their snowshoe-racing brethren -- a blanket coat and Métis sash, like the trappers of old.

The Tuque Bleue was a cornerstone of Montreal's grand, annual winter carnivals and inspired similar groups and toboggan chutes in cities across Canada and the northern United States.

As evening falls in Ottawa, I slide a microfiche into a viewer and am gobsmacked by The Toboggan, an 1886 booklet penned by Harry Clay Palmer, of Chicago, for A.G. Spalding and Bros., the sporting-goods maker.

Mr. Palmer's description of the sport, along with a florid account of a winter trip to Montreal, is clearly aimed at boosting orders for the Vermont-made Star Toboggan advertised in the booklet's back pages: While other models can reach "a mile per minute, even more," makers of the Star "openly advertise three miles per minute with perfect safety," he writes. That's 180 miles (290 kilometres) per hour, by the way.

He follows this dubious claim with equally improbable reassurances: "The timidly inclined may regard such sport with horror," he writes, "but in truth the chances for accident are one in ten thousand, and it is doubtful if any occur even in this ratio."

However, his account of a toboggan-club outing with Dick, his "Montrealese" host, seems accurate enough.

"The landscape seemed to have suddenly gone scampering away in every direction, and everything seemed to be falling with us," Mr. Palmer writes. They reached bottom "with a crash that must have driven my spinal column through the back of my neck, had it not been for the soft cushion beneath us."

And by the end of his tale, he reaches a more enduring truth. Working out in a gym might build the body, he writes, but hurtling down an icy slope, with all its attendant danger, achieves deeper results: "Strengthen your nerves by use and you get a strong and better heart action as well."

If nerves are being tested in Montreal now, it's not on the Mont Royal toboggan hill, at least not today. It's a different city than the one Harry Clay Palmer found, but then he probably didn't foresee global warming, or that driving in this town would provide as much of a nerve test as anyone needs.

The Montreal Amateur Athletic Association has become an upscale gym, on Peel Street just south of Sherbrooke, called Club Sportif MAA. But at least Mr. Palmer would appreciate the stained-glass window to the right of the health club's elegant wood doors: Passed and ignored by more than 1,000 members daily, it shows a man in full Tuque Bleue dress, his blanket coat tied with a sash, snowshoes at his side.

Jocelyn Robert, the club's general manager, shows me around the smartly renovated main lobby of the 100-year-old building. He points to a trophy in the hallway leading to the main-floor gym: "We found that in a vault upstairs, disgusting, dirty."

Cleaned and properly displayed, the Tuque Bleue snowshoeing trophy is nonetheless a relic. Someone tried to resurrect a snowshoe club last year, but despite its renewed popularity among the health-conscious, there was little interest.

As for tobogganing, "I don't have any pins or prizes after the 1930s," Conrad Graham says. He is curator of decorative arts at the McCord Museum, just around the corner on Sherbrooke Street, where a Tuque Bleue uniform hangs on display.

Competitive tobogganing never rose beyond amateur status, while skating and hockey took off and never looked back. The closest competitive equivalent is the bobsleigh, a Swiss invention.

That tobogganing was ever organized at all was a result of the large leisure class created as industry and shipping thrived in late 19th-century Montreal, Mr. Graham says. "They didn't hide in their houses all winter -- they went out and played in the snow. And I sit here and curse it."

The winter carnival, however, was lost in 1889 to bad weather and bad press south of the border -- something about price gouging by the city's cab drivers and innkeepers. And by the time of the Depression, tobogganing was left definitively to the commoners.

Five years after Montreal's carnival shut down, Quebec City, always a few degrees colder, took up the challenge. And of course, since 1955, it has been home to the world's largest annual winter carnival.

It is also the place you can find les Glissades de la Terrasse, one of the last old-style toboggan slides anywhere.

"I had to try it," says Rob, who won't give his last name because he's supposed to be working. "How many times are you up at 3 in the morning and you see this on TV?"

Visiting from Ottawa, Rob has come to brave les Glissades, known in English as the Dufferin Terrace Toboggan Slide, behind the Château Frontenac hotel. Here, for two bucks, you can haul a wooden toboggan up a slippery ramp to the 82-metre-high platform, put it in one of the three iced chutes and ride it 152 metres to the bottom.

"It was kind of freaky," says Rob, 32. "You're kind of reaching a point where you're going too fast, and then you level out."

For the past seven years, maintenance man André Savard has trained his hose on the slide, which he says was first built in 1887 and is the only one of its kind left in Canada. But this year, mild weather kept the slide from opening until Jan. 15, a month behind schedule. Even now, it bears the telltale bumps of frequent thaws.

I take a ride myself, but find it lacking. Too much like one of those theme-park slides that you ride down on a sheet of burlap. Too predictable. What were those Victorians thinking?

Looking for a greater thrill, I drive east to Parc de la Chute-Montmorency, hoping to find the fabled ice cone that forms in winter from the spray off the 83-metre-high Montmorency Falls. Known to reach a height of 30 metres, the cone has long been a favourite for tobogganers and painters.

But this year, it's not there.

At the top of the falls, behind the information counter inside the Manoir Montmorency banquet hall, Elise Royer explains: "When it is very cold, the falls make that," she says. "Now, it's not cold enough."

In an age of litigiousness and liability insurance, it's surprising to learn tobogganing still goes on here when the cone does form. All it takes is a supervisor to make sure no one slides the wrong way and into the water.

But it also takes a couple of weeks straight of temperatures 20 to 30 degrees below zero for temperatures to produce the cone, Ms. Royer says. And that's looking more doubtful by the day.

Maybe next year.

It's raining buckets on Autoroute 15, but the drops turn to flakes the size of fists at Saint-Jérôme, and they keep on falling all the way to Mont Tremblant. That's a good thing, because 500 engineering students from 27 schools across the country are gathered at Gray Rocks ski resort for the 32nd annual Great Northern Concrete Toboggan Race.

It's a uniquely Canadian competition, and in typical Canadian fashion, it was born in response to an American contest, the Concrete Canoe Race.

Clayton Clem, a 48-year-old engineer on vacation from Ooltewah, Tenn., was out for a ski with his Québécois wife when he happened upon the event. "I find it a little intriguing," he says, looking bemused at the base of the competition hill among the various teams and their strange creations. "I'm sure that it makes the wintertime much more exciting and appear much shorter than it otherwise would be.

"But I wish they'd hurry up and take another run, because I'd like to get skiing."

Soon enough, the event is on, with each team sliding individually, as in bobsleigh. Each toboggan must accommodate five riders, weigh no more than 300 pounds, have a concrete running surface and include a braking system.

Rule 5.3.4 hints at interesting possibilities: "If the toboggan breaks or splits into more than one piece at the time of braking, the braking distance will be measured from the point farthest to the finish line on the largest piece of the toboggan."

This year's offerings stay pretty much in one piece, but there are other highlights.

The University of Regina Top Guns, for example, have a pneumatic system that elevates the riders' compartment above the toboggan's concrete skis, then drops it to the ground as its braking method. They wind up carrying their vehicle across the finish line, like pallbearers.

The University of Calgary team, dressed as Mounties, lose their brakes altogether and plow into the tires at the end of the course.

Most of these people have been working all year to design, build and tweak their machines, with serious technical rigour. Yet on race day, you have to look hard to find it behind all the goofing around. Maybe tobogganing is one of those things it's impossible to be serious about.

"It's the best sport ever, because it's fun for everyone," Maria Campanelli of Team Calgary says before the fateful race. "And most of the time, it's safe. Most of the time."

In fact, at age 2½, Ms. Campanelli broke her leg after her toboggan hit a fence. But she laughs when she talks about it.

"Risk usually makes everything a little more fun, right?" she says. Then she adds, "I gotta go," and heads off to slide downhill on her butt, in a line with her teammates.

On the return trip to Montreal, in the Laurentian resort town of Saint-Sauveur, tobogganing's future awaits. From his home base here, Norman Boivin, 45, has spent the past two years in an uphill battle to take the pastime up a notch.

Make that two notches.

Mr. Boivin, a snowshoe salesman, is also the Eastern Canada agent for the Airboard, a Swiss-made, inflatable polyurethane pad, with a ribbed rubber bottom, that will take you down a hill about as fast as you're willing to go.

You don't just ride it -- you drive it. You lie on your stomach and go down head first, leaning to either side and pushing down on the handles to steer, and with some practice, stop as you would on skis.

As such, the Airboard is made for the big hills. The $300 price tag only bolsters that point. But so far, Canadian resort operators have been cool to it, citing safety concerns.

Meanwhile, a half-dozen American ski resorts have made room for the Airboard on their slopes, alongside other "extreme" winter activities such as snowboarding, even though the risk of getting sued is higher there. The irony is not lost on Mr. Boivin, who grew up in the Laurentians, sneaking onto ski hills after hours to ride his Krazy Karpet, before graduating to competitive skiing. "I thought we were more open than that."

In a further prick to our national pride, an American -- from California, no less -- holds the North American distribution rights to the Airboard. Mr. Boivin reports to Ann-Elise Emerson, who founded Berkeley-based Emo Gear to market the "snow bodyboard."

After riding one in Europe, Ms. Emerson says, "I laughed so hard that I had tears rolling out of my eyes." Her husband is an executive with the Atlas Snow-Shoe Company, Mr. Boivin's other employer. "I think it's just a question of time" before Canadian resorts warm to the Airboard, she says.

Mr. Boivin, who says he has conducted numerous demonstrations and won the approval of ski patrol and insurance officials, agrees: "Snowboarding took a long time, so I'm hoping maybe four to five years."

I can't wait that long. I borrow a demonstration model, head toward home and hope the winter still has some snow left in it.

The hill at Lakeside Park is no mountain, and it is not a "delta kame," the term my Grade 9 geography teacher gave to it during a field trip. My brothers watched bulldozers build the hill out of suburban Kitchener soil in the 1960s. It is what it is -- a decent city toboggan hill of the type found in most communities -- but it means more to me, since I grew up around it.

After all, tobogganing is something just about everybody in this country has done, in some form, since they were old enough to sit up, often at one hill, maybe two. Those first hills become the standard by which future toboggan runs are measured.

So to judge the Airboard, I needed to come here.

My two sons and their cousin run on ahead with a snowboard and some plastic saucers, while I inflate the grey-and-black Airboard, my heart quickening as I recall Mr. Boivin telling me that he had been clocked at 99 kilometres an hour during a ski-hill demonstration.

Seconds into my first run, I don't doubt it. This thing is fast. Yet it's so stable that the ride, on a small, straightforward hill like this one, is like swimming lengths in a bathtub -- too easy, and over before you know it. I see now why it's meant for the big slopes.

The kids are easier to please.

"Sometimes on the saucer, you turn and you don't want to," says Evan, my 10-year-old. "On the Airboard, you can turn [on purpose]. So I'd say it's funner."

Adam, 12, likes "the speed, feeling your hair blow back or your hat fall off."

It occurs to me, thinking back to the luge, to Quebec City and what people said along the way, that enjoying tobogganing is less about equipment and organization than about getting the mixes right -- control and chaos, risk and reward, hanging on and letting go.

On a rare snowy day in the midst of a mild winter, there are worse things to learn.

Anthony Reinhart is a feature writer with The Globe and Mail.