You sleigh me!

Ever since Ed Gorlewski fashioned a sled from a snow shovel at his cottage near Oliphant, Ont., his son-in-law Craig Saunders has been able to head north without packing the pram.

“It’s too snowy in winter for most strollers anyway,” says Saunders. “With the skiboggan, you can take a wee one for a walk without getting the tires stuck in the snow. And, you can run along behind and push at a comfortable height, rather than pulling a sled from the front.”

Ready to retire a scoop shovel that he never really liked using, Grandpa Gorlewski pulled a pair of old cross-country skis out of hibernation and stripped off the bindings. After cutting a couple of scrap 2 x 6s into pieces that would support the shovel’s length, Gorlewski screwed them to the skis and, using screws and washers, mounted the snow shovel to the top edge of the boards. For added cross-support, he tacked on two more boards, one to the front and the other to the rear of the shovel, spanning the width of the scoop.

“Right after it was done, I charged around with it on the frozen, windswept beach,” says Saunders, “and my son Graham loved it.”

There’s only one problem with the skiboggan, he adds. “You can never go fast enough to satisfy a two-year-old.”

-Pat Lynch

Originally published in the Winter 2006 issue of Cottage Life magazine.

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