Were there any activities/games you experienced as a kid that had an element of danger attached?

We used to go to new construction sites and have dirt bomb fights and make forts in the rafters. This was fun and games until we got old enough to really be throwing large clumps. My friend Chris, still to this day is minus his right eye….
We used to also make pipe bombs out of chlorine tablets for my friends parents hot tub. We’d toss a few in to a length of pipe with something from under the sink land cap it up.
I also used to have bb gun wars with a few friends until someone did not abide by the two pump rule and got one logged pretty good in their leg. After that we started using eye protection.
Bike jousting. Went well until I snapped a collar bone and arm.
There was also an old construction site that was about a 10 mile bike ride out where two cranes had been left to rust apart in the middle of the woods. We used to climb to the top of those, this is where I smoked my first cigarette, joint and looked at my first porno mag. Thankfully no one ever fell. We used to climb it mostly at night. It was about 150’ up and not much room to sit on the top when you were with someone. It was probably even 50’ to get to the crane box.
I think all of my youth prepared me for the military. I now at the age of 36 enjoy most of my aches and pains.
Ahhh the comings of age. God bless it.

Ah, lawn darts, I remember you well!

We used to throw lit sparklers at each other. The ones on the wire that burned forever not the new kind that are so ‘safe’ you need a flamethrower to light them.

Jumping from trees onto trampolines, jumping off trampolines into pools, and jumping off roofs onto a stack of mattresses.

Wild berry picking in the Wisconsin woods. Once I was picking on one side of a bush and there was a black bear cub picking on the other side. Sure glad momma didn’t notice me before I backed off.

When I was maybe 7 and my sister 5, we used to get into the medicine cabinet and make cocktails with her Fisher Price blender (and drink them).

We used to ride our bikes (without helmets which weren’t in then) in traffic. We used to play at a construction site. One little boy was run over by a piece of heavy equipment.

Almost all of them. I’d ride in the back of my grandfather’s pickup (at high speeds on the highway); I’d roam the neighborhood at night; I’d swing from a homemade trapeze; I’d drive the go-cart my grandfather made for me; I’d mow the lawn in bare feet. I actually have scars from a few of these activities. It was a different time then—before seatbelts, helmets and parent/product liability.

Pretty much all the best ones:

Riding bikes- we went everywhere before bike lanes.

Climbing trees- kids fell and broke limbs all the time but we still kept climbing.

Hiking waterfalls- you could slip, scrape, seriously maim youself.

Horseback riding- the horses would kick, buck, bite, throw you off while galloping.

Building forts- our favorite was digging massive tunnels into the ground, sure to collapse about 3–4ft in.

Hiking the canyon. There were black widow spiders, scorpions, lots of rattlesnakes, poison oak, biting ants and rockslides triggered by coyotes.

This sounds lame, I know, but where I go camping, the playground has this wheel spinning thing that, when it got fast enough, would fling kids off of it. Every year, at least 10 of us got hurt, but we loved it anyway. I was sad when they took it out. I was excited to become the teens who would make the things go fast.

@Neizvestnaya I do all of those except the last one. No canyons here.

@TheIntern55: Every kid I grew up with there reminisces and wishes they had the same kind of place to raise their own kids. We also had an evil merry-go-round at our local Girl’s Club that would spit kids off or drag them under. heh.

Climbing buildings by using rain-pipes and protrusions.
Now that I think about it again and when I walk pass these schools and community centers every now and then I feel belated fright.

We used to jump off the roof of anything we could get onto the roof of in the first place.

Once, during a huge storm we were out walking and we found some long metal poles. So we each grabbed one and went to the top of the highest hill we could find and held them up to the sky. Screaming. Nothing happened, except the old lady in the house nearby looked very concerned.

And..not that it’s really dangerous, but we played tag and hide and seek a lot. I was always scared out of my mind that they would find me and I was going to die. It was very real for me, like a “bad guy” was going to get me. And sometimes I still have nightmares about tag. One of siblings is chasing me, I fall and I can’t get back up, and everything is in slow motion after I fall. They never tag me though. I always wake up right before they touch me.
It’s funny after I wake up, but in my dream it’s so scary

Probably the most dangerous one we played was Blind Man’s Bluff. :P

Playing spin the bottle with Mary-Jane Rottencrotch

In school, I was knows as the school geek. But at home, I was quite a daredevil as a kid. For instance, a bunch of us would take turns getting in a giant tractor inner tube and roll down a hill into a pond. Or once, I sent away for one of those giant weather balloons. When I had a birthday one time, I got my parents to rent a tank of helium for party balloons. Instead, I used it to inflate the weather balloon. I had the idea to tie a rope around one of my waist and float away. Luckily, it didn’t work. As it was inflating, the balloon burst when it touched a power line before I had a chance to tie myself to it. That would have been a cool way to commit suicide. Float higher and higher until the balloon burst, with no way to be rescued…

Paintball in the woods. One kid actually popped up and snagged his face mask on a shrub. The mask was pulled down as a ball hurdled straight toward his face. He lost an eye.

Bumper Skiing in the winter. Grabbing the bumper of an unsuspecting car or bus and having it pull you down a snowy/icy street.

Mumbley peg.

Bottle rocket fights.

Talking back to Mother Superior.

Bottle rockets? Pfft! Try real rockets made out of paper towel tubes and powered with solid rocket engine propellant modules ignited with nichrome igniters powered by an old car battery :-p

I actually scored an A+ in science class one year by demoing such a rocket as my class project. For a brief moment, I was one of the cool kids :-p

@HungryGuy If you shot solid engine propellant modules at each other, then I bow to your coolness.

I spent much of my childhood mucking about on a farm. Climbing haystacks, messing about with (dangerous) machinery, wandering across fields for miles with no adult having a clue where I was. <sarcasm>It’s a miracle I even survived.</sarcasm>

Playing with Clackers, those hard acrylic balls that hang on strings with a metal ring. I remember kids getting whacked in the head with the balls.

Firecrackers.

Target practice with BB guns.

@MRSHINYSHOES clackers were banned from my school in the 1970s because kids were breaking their wrists with them.

Shooting the primers of shotgun shells with our BB guns. Don’t forget to put nails in the top of the fence post to deflect the shell from coming straight back.

@downtide Yes, they were dangerous. I remember a kid got whacked really hard in the forehead with the ball, another got whacked in the eye.

I loved climbing when I was younger. Some friends and I made a climbing club, and gave ourselves nicknames. I was Skycrawler, one guy was Reptile (after the Mortal Kombat character) and one girl called herself Canonball. There were other participants in our ’‘club’’, but we were the three main ones who climbed everything we saw. Cannonball was the best climber out of all of us. She was so tiny that she had no problem getting up and around shit, and found amazing alternate routes when she couldn’t reach some of what we were able to.
We had one rule to the club; if you don’t think you can climb back down, then don’t climb up. We all considered it pretty seriously, and I bet that saved our asses many times lol.
I had my own personal rule; don’t challenge nature. After climbing in a tree and falling out, breaking my arm.

Yeah pretty lame lol. But we got good fast, and started climbing dangerous shit. It went from rooftops to underneath bridges, cranes and those huge ass billboards you see on highways. Church rooftops, too. There were a shitload of churches in that neighborhood. Construction sites were always awesome, too.
Sometimes, while climbing things, I got so scared that I was so careful that it seemed impossible to fall. That was horsehit, although it never did happen to me, it easily could have. I look back and I’m like, Jesus…deep inside me though, I’d it all over again. You get such a fuckin rush lol. But yes, evidently, it was extremely dangerous. We also got taken back home by the police a few times lol.

One time I was with a friend from our climbing club. He was never too good, but extremely daring. We climbed up unto a church roof, a lower part than the rest of the church. It was triangle shaped, with windows jutting out, triangle shaped too but opposite of the main roof, so they acted like small platforms. You had to sort of run on the main roof and hop on the small window roof, and keep doing that until you got to the end to climb on the higher portion. We were so fuckin retarded though, because the whole roof was glazed in thin ice from frozen rain. I made it to the second window rood, but my friend didn’t, and fell and rolled off the roof…but that lucky bastard actually managed to grab the gutter on his way down, and prevented a fall. It wasn’t a big fall, but had he fallen, he would have fell straight on a fence, most likely. He climbed down with the gutter. It’s a miracle that thing didn’t break, they’re usually so damn flimsy.

This was a teen thing more than a kid thing though. As well as setting fires in garbage bins and making huge bonfires in the woods down by the river…not proud of it, and that was also extremely dangerous, for us and many other people. But what can I say, it happened. :/
As a kid, I wasn’t too hardcore, but again, on my own, I loved climbing things. Usually trees, buildings and garage roofs. Nothing hardcore like I described above, but it had to start somewhere.
Also, in Winter, I used to love digging tunnels in huge snow banks, left there by snowplows. Some got very big, and I could spend up to eight hours making a tunnel. But the way I made them, from the bottom to the top (or the other way around) in a bending arc, if it decided to crumble on me while I was inside, I woulda been fucked. I showed one of the tunnels to my dad once, and he pretty much forbade me to make them again. :/

Things that would cause people to cringe today I did as a kid:
• BB gun wars.
• Rock fights.
• Climbing to the tops of tall trees.
• Climbing on the roof and jumping off onto the ground, no mattress or padding.
• Riding down the street on a coastcart built from scrap material.
• Making firecracker rockets with old soup cans and pie tins.
• Making flame throwers with aerosol cans and matches.
• Trespassing in cow pastures, some with bulls, and some without.

Ah……..the fun we had.

Jumping from roof to roof. 30 foot fall onto a fence if you missed. Wooden fence below might cut you in half.

Climbing up rain gutters to the roof of the school. Once again, 30 foot drop if you slip, or the rain gutter gives way.

Shooting bottle rockets at each other.

Shooting arrows at each other, and trying to catch them.

Riding down the weedy hill on a torn cardboard box.

Stupid stuff on bikes.
Much tree-climbing.
Too many incendiary experiments.
Sledding down the landing hill of a ski jump (not the jump itself though; we were reckless but not stupid) and through the woods… cliffs be damned!

@filmfann I always thought that Roman Candles were more fun than bottle rockets.

Cheers folks, good stuff.
I wanted to be either a footballer or a stuntman, so when I wasn’t playing football i’d be “auditioning” for the latter. Constantly scaling buildings, schools mostly, only to then leap off. Landed on grassy areas & finished with an artistic roll…..most of the time anyway.
A bunch of us would seek out the most dangerous shit, a good one was using street lights as a Batman pole. They were made of a slippery steel back then & sliding down the ones peppering the motorway I remember as being particularly thrilling.
I’d still be doing it now, but i’ve a feeling the local police would frown upon such larks…..spoilsports.

I broke my arm when I fell out of a tree so…

@mrrich724 And things like that is why paintball is banned in my town.:(

Cowtipping! woot!

@HungryGuy how about tractortipping?

@TheIntern55 – Tractortipping?!?! Never tried that….

@HungryGuy Yeah, not that I have either, (nervous laughter)