High Spender - The Hammerhead - $349

Hammerhead Sleds

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Mid Range - The Mad River Rocket - $127

Mad River Rocket

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Cheaper
Wham-O has a bunch of cheaper options, but the TechFlyer looks the most promising at $48. Quite fugly though.

Wham-O

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And cheapest
Make your own dang sled out of all that junk in your garage.

My brother created a neat homebrew sled. I just made a couple for our kids for Xmas.

At this point, I can't think of a better homemade sled. Feel free to post your own ideas, plans, links!

What you do is take a plastic tub sled ($10 hardware store) and screw a pair of XC skis to the bottom of it---if it's a sled for kids---or a pair of metal-edge downhill skis if adults might use it. Use stout, short screws and big washers to avoid pull-thru. Then you glue foam-padding to the inside of the tub.

This sled runs really straight. And superfast, smooth and far.

I wonder if it can be made to allow for turning. --Maybe by angling the skis inward at the front a bit one could lean out to turn away from the lean.

If you first screw on a wood spacer to the skis before mounting to the sled, you can ride through deeper snow without scrubbing speed on the bottom of the sled---far faster. It's great fun to float over the snow that way.

Out Your Backdoor

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The core sledding locations - do some investigation at the New England Lost Ski Area Project

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Reviews

Some kids want to grow up and be firefighters. Some want to be president. But when I was child, I wanted to be a professional luge racer. I'm not sure what inspired my dream—certainly not the skintight outfits—but every winter I packed down the snow that fell in our driveway and covered it with freezing water until it hardened into a demonically fast sledding hill. In my 9-year-old mind, this was my path to Olympic fame.

But my illustrious career was cut short one afternoon when my brother gave me a hard push at the top of the run. I careened down the hill and flew off the track, diving into a large shrub. A frozen twig stabbed through my cheek, and I spent the evening in the hospital, my hopes of an Olympic gold shattered. Note this picture of me a few days into my early luge retirement, practicing a new sport on my brother.

Imagining a Rocky Balboa-like comeback, I jumped at a chance to test out the latest in sledding technology. When I was a kid, sleds looked pretty much the same as they had in the Middle Ages: a small platform on top of two runners. Today the market is flooded with various makes and models, from simple, plastic saucers to high-end, snowmobilelike sleds complete with steering wheels and brakes. One, called the Airboard, promises Porsche-like handling. It also comes with a Porsche-like price tag: nearly $300.
Read it all in SLATE