Four toys to make your winter more perilous

Winter has always been Canada's toughest season. It's cold, it's damp and the wind can cut right through you. Sometimes, it feels like the winter is trying to kill you. 

But for some folks, the weather isn't perilous enough. They need to find new ways to bring a sense of danger to the season. Here are a few fun/terrifying winter toys to make winter that much more frightening.

Toboggan/crazy carpet 

Honestly, what kid in Canada hasn't injured themselves on a toboggan or crazy carpet? According to Parachute Canada, a non-profit charity dedicated to preventing serious injury, out of every 100,000 tobogganers and sledders, an average of 37.7 suffer catastrophic injury each year. That makes tobogganing a dangerous sport in Canada. Which shouldn't actually shock you: a toboggan is basically just some wood planks with a string attached, but at least it has small sides. 

A crazy carpet is even worse. What little protection a toboggan offers is completely and utterly absent. It is just a sheet of plastic with some hand holes. There's no structural integrity whatsoever. If you add moguls to either activity, you can get some big air, to go with your great speed; but one way or another, disastrous consequences probably await you.

Broken bones, concussions, and spinal cord injuries have all been reported as a result of tobogganing. While sledding is a glorious Canadian winter tradition, without the proper safety equipment or precautions  — probably not a good idea to toboggan on a hill at night with obstacles — it can also put you a whisper from death.

Wham-o Arctic Force Snowball Blaster and the Arctic Force Snow Crossbow

The commercial says "It ain't your daddy's snowball fight," but maybe in should be. These toys took the old refrain about snowball fights — "someone's gonna lose an eye" — to new levels.  The three-compartment packer on top of the Blaster makes three perfect snowballs when you smash the press down. It claims to fling snowballs 80 feet, or roughly the length of a tennis court. 

Though one is a crossbow and the other is a "blaster," both toys work the same way with and embedded slingshot. This review of the crossbow from Timetoplaymag.com explicitly says that snowballs are only to be flung at the included target sheet, not at people or pets, and that goggles must be worn at all times. Is any kid going to listen to that? 

The HangBoard

This invention, by Canadian Inventors Hall of Fame Inductee Don Arney  has been seen on The Discovery Channel, but Arney is still waiting for a partner to bring The Hangboard to market since its creation. Arney, a pilot and resident of Vancouver Island, invented The Hangboard in 2002. He wanted to give downhill skiers and snowboarders the sensation of flight on the hill. 

Part of the reason the HangBoard struggled to take off may have been the fact it put riders only inches from the snow, going downhill face-first in a superman position at speeds of up to 160 km/h. The rider is in a harness suspended by a small fold-out crane over a snowboard as they hang on to bars in front of them. They use that bar to shift their weight and steer. Meanwhile, their feet control rudders that they dip into the snow to break and initiate a turn. 

Really though, you have to see it to believe it.

The inventor and his "daring test pilots" insist the Hangboard is 100 per cent safe, but forgive us for being dubious. It seems like a niche product for only the most daring, but if it does go mainstream, it wouldn't be hard to imagine it in child-size right alongside the regular skis and snowboards for kids. Is it a toy? It could very well be one day.

Slegoon: The Sled Pod-Racer

Imagine careening down a hill as if you were inside a pistachio, where the shell acts as a roll-cage. This is a single-person pod invented by Spike Reid, and is  made from what looks like the same inflatable material in a bounce house. It would allow two people to race in their pods side-by-side to bounce across the slopes, rolling and tumbling as they continue flipping upside-down, forward and back like a giant skiing beach ball. The roll cage would double as extra runners should the pod land upside-down, which it most certainly will. 

Oh, what fun! Or just a good way to lose your lunch and have a friend watch while you do it. Nevertheless, in 2003 this ski-resort activity design concept won first prize in a design contest called the UK IOM3, which celebrates excellence in plastics innovation. 

Watch Back in Time for Winter Thursdays at 8 p.m. (8:30 NT) on CBC and CBC Gem.