Ice-talavista, Baby!

Ice can turn even the most tame playground into an Awesome and Dangerous Project adventure!

MANCHESTER, NH – We finally figured out how to make the sanitized playground fun again. And the answer is so simple.

Ice.

We’re fortunate to live in a city that does not care one whit about making its parks and playgrounds safe for human use. Unshovelled playgrounds mean one thing, my friends, and that is ice! As winter refuses to release its freezing grip on the city, the Livingston Park Playground has become a fantastic, plastic death trap.

Every playground ride, no matter the ridiculous safety precautions built into it, becomes Awesome and Dangerous when placed on a fine bed of crunchy, hard, super slick ice.

Want to test your balance on the roller bar? Sure, easy enough in the summer to just jump off when it gets too fast. But add a layer of ice below and now any step-down becomes a riveting journey of flailing arms and bruised hips.

Want to give those monkey bars a go? Who doesn’t! In the summer, you can drop down off the bars into a fine bed of comfortable wood chips. But now, you’d have to be Wayne Gretzky to stay standing once you hit the ice below.

The bottom of the boring slide now becomes a frozen minefield. The plastic, tame swing? Try sticking a landing without tearing an ice burn through your snow pants. In the pic above, Janelle illustrates the superb danger of even the simplest of roll bars. Where will she go next, how will she return to the ground without loosing her balance and careening headlong onto the ice or into the bars themselves? Who knows!

So hats off to Manchester for deciding to ignore the ice and give our children a playground that tests our kids’ nerve. Game on, Manchester, game on!