When snow came to Utah during the Christmas break, Thomas Williams and his family built their annual ice luge track around the family's home in South Jordan. It's a course that is 300 feet long and nearly two stories high and has stairs of snow and ice cut into it, KSL reported.
Williams and many of his 15 children spent 10 hours a day during the Christmas holidays shoveling and collecting snow from the neighbors' yards to aid in the construction, Today reported. The family then tested the course to make sure it was safe before inviting the neighbors.
"We’d get all their snow and put it into garbage cans," 15-year-old Daniel Williams told KSL. "We’d wheel it back and dump it — which is where the girls, my sisters, they’d go and get water from the garage and fill it up in jugs because it’s all powder snow and it wouldn’t pack, so we would pour water all over it and then we would take it and pack it on the luge and start icing it down.
"Last Saturday, we had all the neighbors come over and we had a big party and had them ride it,” Daniel Williams said. “(We) had a big, long line up the stairs."
Chrissy Williams said the family has been building the luge for 15 years whenever there is enough snow. She told KSL that the idea began with a simple five-foot slide.
“(The kids) wanted a snow slide,” she told KSL. “(Thomas) made it taller and bigger and then the kids started helping. I think it’s insane, but they love it.”
This year's wintry weather in Utah lasted only a week and the luge began to melt when temperatures rose into the 40s and 50s.
"The kids and the neighbors are highly disappointed, and my husband is highly disappointed too because of all the work he put into it," Chrissy Williams told KSL Monday morning. "If it were to snow right now, they would rebuild it, but I don’t think that’s in the forecast right now."
The family said they would likely try again next year.
"Every year, my dad says it’s the last one, we’re never doing it again," Daniel Williams told KSL. "But we always do it the next year."
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