TRUE DAKOTAN

True Dakotan photo/Duke Wenzel -- The "contraption" that has provided the free ride up the sledding hill (looking downward... note the panoramic scene overlooking the prairie) for a couple of generations.

BY CRAIG WENZEL

TRUE DAKOTAN EDITOR

Remember this? Back in the 1950′s –when I was just a kid, REALLY– there was a local guy who did excavating and digging, building roads, earthen dams, and whatever else needed to be done. A.J. Gebhardt was a bit of a genius, actually, able to fabricate about anything you –or he– could imagine. So the Wessington Springs city park had this big hill that kids used for sledding in the wintertime, but A.J. –and probably some of the town council members– decided a rope lift would be good. And they were right. Once A.J. set his mind to it the rope lift would carry us kids back up the hill for another run.

It was the darnest contraption — a combination of old tire rims, an electric motor and a huge rope that strung around the various rims before heading down the poles on the face of the hill. It worked! And second and third generation kids are still using it today. There wasn’t enough snow on the hill until the Christmas blizzard dropped 20 inches on Wessington Springs and the rest of the county. So the city boys went to work to put the rope back up for kids to use again during the 2009-2010 winter. They were putting it up this week, but it turned out somebody helped themselves to one of the pulleys at the bottom –I know, can you believe they TOOK IT?– so they got stopped. It won’t be long, though, and they’ll have it fixed and ready for today’s area kids to enjoy, and to make childhood memories.

Do you have a memory of the Wessington Springs sledding hill, and/or “the rope” that used to give us a ride back up? Post it in the “comments” box below. We love hearing from you.