The best way to deal with a serious snowstorm? Sledding with a trash bag.

BRISTOL, Va. – It is axiomatic that serious snowfall requires a serious response, from stocking up on groceries and gas to sticking to the clearest streets.

But when that snowfall happens on a Saturday, the most serious response to Mother Nature might be trudging a few hundred feet up a sheer slope at Sugar Hollow Park with nothing but garbage bags in hand.

That was where Matt Collins and Joseph Simmons and a few friends trekked, surrounded by families with brightly colored sleds in all manner of shapes, under a dingy white sky.

Collins, 40, and Simmons, 34, didn’t bother with sleds. They didn’t have any, and they were looking for a faster ride anyway.

“Oh, sweet Jesus!” shouted Simmons as he barreled down the slope, hit a bump, caught several feet of air and crashed his way down the rest of the hill. “It’s like an amusement park, man,” he said, his breath coming in gasps. “You’d be surprised what little it can take to have a good time.”

So little, in fact, that it wasn’t immediately clear what Simmons was using for a sled. So little he could have rolled it up and jammed it into his pants pocket.

The sled of choice was a black trash bag – or more precisely, half of a black trash bag.

Collins, a professional pavement sealer, that morning had brought the best thing he could think of to maximize sledding speed: four garbage bags, which he slit down the sides, so that they looked like wrinkly, ultra-thin black capes as they flapped in the wind.

“We always broke out the trash bags [for sledding] when we were kids,” Collins, originally of Jefferson City, Tenn., said. “My family didn’t have a whole lot of money.”

At the summit of the slope, one friend would spread the corners of the rectangular bag cutout evenly over the ground, while another would flop onto it and careen down the hill.

Trash bags weren’t the only improvised sleds that Collins, Simmons and company brought to the park Saturday. There was a blue tarpaulin, an old mattress cover, and a can of Canola oil cooking spray to grease the ride down.

It was just that the trash bags worked better than anything else.

“That bag is IT!” Simmons shouted after another high-velocity plunge.

Simmons, who is from Maryland but lives in Bristol, Tenn., said he’d never had a better sledding experience. He works in restaurants and composes gospel rap on the side.

“Can I give you a line?” he said, staggering up the hill and launching into a verse that mixed New and Old Testament verses: “Jesus, our father, revealed himself in the sun. Hear o Israel, the Lord is one!”

Some 50 paces away, a father cautiously set his young daughter onto a bright orange sled. They stood halfway down the slope, and the father released the girl with an exclamation: “This is half nuts!”

By this assessment, 100 percent nuts Saturday might have been a sled-run at twice the elevation, on half of a trash bag, with or without Canola oil.

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