Sometimes you'd get out on the hill and find the snow was too deep. So what we'd do is get one of the neighborhood kids with a saucer sled and have one or two of us plop in the thing and then couple others drag them down the hill by the legs to start a path. Then when we all walked back up we'd walk like Charlie Chaplin back up the hill to help pack it down more. Remember having dog fights on the way down... trying to flip somebody's sled or run them off the track on the way down. Always hurt bad when you got your hand under the runner in a flip attempt. Cold hands always hurt more.
Another option if the snow was too deep was to run down the side of the road. It was a really long hill and a pain to drag the sled all the way back up but we'd be flying by the time we hit bottom and started up the other side.
If you made it a good ways you could cut a little drag time off on the way back. We'd do this in the dark and you just kept your eyes open for headlights. 
Today they'd probably lock up a parent for letting a kid do that. 
If we'd see the road grader or the ash truck coming we'd wave him over to try get him to not ash the downhill side of the road. If some cinders made it into our path there were times we'd all grab a broom and clean off a path down the side cause if you hit too many they'd slow you way down but it was kinda cool to see the sparks fly off the sleds.Man we used to have a ball...
When we got tired of dragging sleds we'd break into groups and give a time limit for building a fort and stock piling ammo. When the time limit was up the snowball battle would start. The object was to get an adequate fort for protection and a hefty stockpile of ammo. There was a little bit of strategy to this that a buddy and I would use when we had these battles. You never use the snow around your fort for building your fort. You go way forward or left or right and roll your snowballs over so you'd have plenty of ammo snow behind your fort. If the snow wasn't real deep we'd roll balls over behind the fort to pick off of for ammo.
Most every battle would have a time-out in there somewhere when somebody'd get beaned in face and need a little time to... uh... re-group.
The grainy texture of a hard packed slushy snowball in the face feels a lot like gravel when your face is about froze.Then when you all decided to call it quits for the night or somebodys parent started yelling for some to come in you have the issue of getting your frozen stuff off. Frozen finger always had a hard time undoing all those black toggle things on the old black rubber boots... that you had to buy a size or two bigger to make room for an extra pair of wool socks. The treat was getting some hot chocolate after you got all your crap off and propped up to dry. I think my mum was rewarding us with it for staying out of her hair for a few hours.
Yep... those were the days...
We lived across the gravel road from a creek with a high levee. When the grass was green we would go up to the local market and get some pieces of cardboard. Yup those pieces made great sleds for flying down the levee.
had a lot of great times.
Look at that grass.. 
