FULLERTON : Truck Brings Winter to Sunny Park Hill

Charles Harley gave a gentle shove Wednesday and watched his 2-year-old daughter, Alisa, slide 100 feet down a slush-covered slope in Fullerton’s Hillcrest Park.

His wife, Eileen, watched Alisa grip her round plastic toboggan and make a five-second descent, gravity barely able to tug the smiling youngster down the 16 tons of ice covering the hill.

“She’s a brave little bunny,” said Eileen Harley, 35, of Orange, one of about 150 parents and children who played Wednesday in a winter scene brought not by Mother Nature but by refrigerator truck.

Fullerton’s Community Services Department brought the snow to the park at 6 a.m. and shoveled it into a 5-inch layer on the hill and a four-ton pile nearby for the young and the less adventurous to make snowballs and snowmen.

Although the event wasn’t to begin until late morning, “we couldn’t hold them off very long,” said Jorge Araujo, a senior recreation leader with the city Community Services Department. The city crew came out early and planned to stay until 4 p.m., he said. “But I don’t think (the ice) is going to last that long.”

Children and parents struggled up the hill with everything from wooden sleds with metal runners to plastic trash-can tops, sheets of cardboard and plastic trash-can liners.

Children lined up in several lanes at the top of the icy hill, waiting for traffic below to clear before starting their race down. Unavoidable lane changes brought a few collisions and a few tears, but the children for the most part struggled back up the hill for another go.

“This is great!” said Debbie Switzer as her sons, ages 4 and 6, rode together on a toboggan. “You don’t even have to drive to the mountains.”

Switzer, 35, a legal secretary from Fullerton, said she even made a run down the hill with the boys. “But they didn’t want me to go after that. It goes too fast and too far with me on it.”

Most children playing in the snow wore sweaters, coats, mittens and gloves. But those East Coast garments were shed after the West Coast sun broke through.

The sun teamed up with the sledding and snowball-throwing to erase much of the ice by about 12:30, but some children continued lining up and sliding down, sometimes over a stretch of slushy soil at the bottom.

“She’s beginning to look like a mud queen,” Eileen Harley said after her 2-year-old’s umpteenth slide down the hill.