Toboggan Racing in Maine

This is the time of year when folks in Camden, Me., begin thinking about ice. Not the ice on the roads or the ice on the driveway, the slick, hazardous stuff that one must avoid, scrape, salt or clear. But the all-important ice on Hosmer Pond, just south of town, and the 440-foot wooden chute that spills out onto it.

Without a solid sheet of slippery ice on the chute, and the pond, there can be no toboggan races in this seaside community set on the rocky Atlantic coast 190 miles north of Boston.

Every year since 1991, Camden has staged the U.S. National Toboggan Championships. The name suggests a competition of professional sledders with years of training on a luge. But the races are less Olympics and more winter festival, a reason to gather in the coldest, darkest months of the year and compete on the ice chute, at the foot of the Camden Snow Bowl, the local ski mountain, owned by the town. Anyone with a wooden toboggan meeting specifications can enter the competition. No experience is necessary. Just pay your registration fee and you’re in. 

From “Competitive Tobogganing” by Keith O’Brien for New York Times, 2016; Photo by Craig Digler

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