Skip to main content

The best, ultra fast sleds

[ad_1]


You don’t need to hurl yourself off a cliff or out of a plane to get a taste of adrenaline. This winter, find a hill, put on your puffiest pair of ­fanny-​­protecting snow pants, and grab a slippery rig for a dose of pure, ­gravity-​­powered fun. Ranked here from fastest to slowest, these light and aerodynamic sleds will carry you down slopes and around slick corners, and possibly even propel you into fantastic yard-​sale-​style wipeouts. Ask your pals to record your ice capades in slow motion to relive later, hot cocoa in hand.


  1. The Yukon Hammerhead Pro HD flies across the snow thanks to its 4.5-inch-wide rear skis: They create less friction than a flat-­bottom ride, and won’t dig into terrain like ­classic skinny rails will.


  2. Flop onto the ­Flexible Flyer Runner, then tear down hard-packed snow. Sleds of this type are usually around 42 inches long, but the Flexi’s 60-inch body supports your legs so they won’t drag and slow you.


  3. Instead of lying down, riders kneel on the 16-inch Mad River Rocket Killer B’s foam pads and secure a strap over their legs. This tight connection enables advanced maneuvers such as jumping and carving.


Related: How to speed up your sled



  1. With no bindings and a short 37-inch length, Burton’s Throwback Snowboard is built for hills, not resorts. The deck has a wood core and a laminated bottom like a real snowboard, so it’ll float over powder.


  2. Attach a pair of slick shin-guard-style Sled Legs directly to your tibias with the inch-wide nylon straps. Then, from the top of the slope, run and slide like a rock star, trusting the foam inside to cushion the landing.


This article was originally published in the Winter 2018 Danger issue of Popular Science.




[ad_2]

Written By Stan Horaczek

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

Humans flourished through a supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago (so you can make it through Tuesday)

[ad_1] About 74,000 years ago, a large chunk of a Pacific island exploded. It sent ash and other debris around the world, including to the southern tip of Africa, where it would be found by a team of international scientists and entered as the latest data point in one of the hottest debates in paleoanthropology ( I know ): Did the Toba supervolcano thrust our planet into a 1,000-year volcanic winter, thus bottle-necking animals and plants alike? Or was it just a little blip on our historic radar? That’s the contentious arena into which our intrepid researchers venture, this time with a new study in Nature establishing that humans in modern-day South Africa not only survived, but flourished after the Toba eruption. Where once was (we think, maybe) a mountain, there is now a huge caldera with a lake inside, and an island inside that. Their evidence shows that debris from the explosion landed 9,000 kilometers (5592.3 miles) away, the farthest distance traveled ever recorded for the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

These 1950s experiments showed us the trauma of parent-child separation. Now experts say they're too unethical to repeat—even on monkeys.

[ad_1] John Gluck’s excitement about studying parent-child separation quickly soured. He’d been thrilled to arrive at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the late 1960s, his spot in the lab of renowned behavioral psychologist Harry Harlow secure. Harlow had cemented his legacy more than a decade earlier when his experiments showed the devastating effects of broken parent-child bonds in rhesus monkeys. As a graduate student researcher, Gluck would use Harlow’s monkey colony to study the impact of such disruption on intellectual ability. Gluck found academic success, and stayed in touch with Harlow long after graduation. His mentor even sent Gluck monkeys to use in his own laboratory. But in the three years Gluck spent with Harlow—and the subsequent three decades he spent as a leading animal researcher in his own right—his concern for the well-being of his former test subjects overshadowed his enthusiasm for animal research. Separating parent and child,...
Post a Comment
Read more