"When I was a kid, I’d be out the door first thing in the morning and back home when the sun set. I can’t even remember eating," Ron King told Playground Magazine during a recent interview.
Not far from our home there was a foothill to the small mountain behind our house with an old growth pine forest covering the hillside. The dense pine canopy limited the undergrowth, so it was nice and open beneath the branches.
There was bedrock on the hill, and water would seep out between its layers in the early part of winter, slowly flow down the hill, and freeze over. And then it would snow, so we had a perfect combination of white fluff on the sides (to cushion potential crashes) and a center run that was almost sheer ice, and fast. Our Radio Flyer sleds (I still have mine!) had steel runners and a crossbar handle that bent the runners left or right to make you feel like you had control.
The run was only about 500 feet, but to us it seemed like a mile, and we would do it over and over and over again, all day long, up and down the steep hill, up and down. No supervision, no rules, just lots of exercise, and free, natural play we happened to discover one day.
Summertime was glorious, and freed us to travel further on our bikes to other parts of town, discovering backyards, stream corridors, swamps, wildflowers, and tall trees.