A man prepared to sled down Skipper Bowles Drive. He took off his shirt. A crowd of around 75 parted. He screamed and raised his arms in the air. He placed a bed on top of a four-wheeled cart and lay down. Students — maybe friends, maybe strangers — started pushing him down the hill. Everyone laughed. Everyone cheered.
In the crowd, Jacob Meyer, a freshman from Charlotte, waited his turn.
“It reminds me of my childhood. In my neighborhood … I would sled all the time down those two hills right next to my house, and this reminds me a lot about it. Just all of it. And the experience here is so much better because there are so many people to share it with,” he said.
“I was talking to my friends, and I was telling them some of these sleds go fast and some of them don’t, but it doesn’t really matter because I’m with the people that I really like.”
Meyer rode down on the cart but skipped putting the mattress on top of it. He nearly hit a fellow student — but didn’t quite. He apologized after he ended his run. The pair high-fived.
A police car was parked at the top of the hill, blocking traffic. An ambulance was stationed at the bottom for a few minutes, keeping watch.
Fanny Laufters, a junior, surveyed the scene.
“The mattress was a new concept. I appreciate the novelty of it,” she said.
Laufters and several friends traveled from Chapel Ridge to South Campus. She said she had never been sledding in Chapel Hill but felt at home riding the mattress down the icy hill.
