February 15th, 2007
snowshoes
First, before I write anything more, I must say that I was a little disappointed to discover that I had *missed* taking note of Burning Silo’s first anniversary. Yes, indeed, a year ago yesterday, I wrote my first post on – of all things – a somewhat hair-raising encounter with a dog sled team! And here I am today, writing about another aspect of winter living here in the not-so-Frozen-North.
A couple of times within recent memory, Wayne from Niches has expressed some interest (or perhaps more like *amusement*), when I’ve mentioned walking around on snowshoes here at the farm. I happen to know that, secretly, he would like to experience walking around in snowshoes, so this post is dedicated to him. (-:
So! This morning, in the wake of yesterday’s minor snowstorm, I decided to break out the snowshoes and take a few photos and *even* make a little movie clip(!!) while out for my morning walk. I should probably mention that it’s quite cold here today. The temperature was hovering around -21C (-6 F), but with very strong winds, making it downright chilly out there. However, I persevered and got my photos despite rapidly freezing hands.
Now, about my snowshoes. One of them appears in the top photo (click on all images for larger views). I’ve had this pair since around Christmas 1972. As you might gather, a good pair of snowshoes can have a long and happy life, and I suspect this pair will long outlast me. They’re made of ash with babiche (rawhide strip) webbing. These days, I think just about all babiche is made from cowhide, but the traditional snowshoes of the First Nations peoples were made using moose or deer hides. My snowshoes came from an outdoor goods store owned by my mom’s brothers. I’m not sure where these shoes were made, but I kind of recall that they came from somewhere in Quebec. I checked around online and found that you can still get snowshoes like these, although many people are now using metal and various plastic types of shoes.
When not in use, we leave our snowshoes outdoors in the cold. If you take warm shoes out into the cold snow, they’ll get icy and snow will stick to them. However, they shouldn’t be left out in very wet snow, or freezing rain, as that’s hard on the babiche and the leather bindings. Snowshoes do need some maintenance — some varnish on the wood and babiche from time to time. Mine should have been done this year, but I’ll take care of that sometime this summer.
For those of you who don’t know much about snowshoes, I looked around on the web to see if I could find some good info on the various traditional styles. The University of Maine’s Hudson Museum has a wonderful website with photos of many styles of shoes. Here’s the introductory page. From there, use the side bar on the left to check out the various pages. It’s a very interesting site with lots of photos of wonderfully intricate traditional snowshoes.
As you can see, in the above photo, I’m now wearing my snowshoes with my hiking boots. I always used to wear cowhide mukluks with my snowshoes, but they’re getting harder to find and are very expensive. These days, I wear winter hiking boots that have a rubber bump on the toe and the back of the heel. These are best suited for use with the kind of leather bindings on my snowshoes. The bindings are adjusted so the that open area in the babiche is sort of just under your toes so that, as you step forward, the snowshoe can lightly drag along as you lift your foot. It’s kind of difficult to explain this, but you don’t want the snowshoe so firmly attached to your foot that it comes off the snow with your foot each time you take a step. If it did, you would soon be feeling tired of wearing them — not that they are at all heavy, as they’re actually very light in weight.
Walking in snowshoes is done in a fairly natural way, but with legs a little farther apart than normal. I like the above style of snowshoe as it’s quite narrow. I’ve used wider shoes which are usually used in deep, soft snow conditions, or when the wearer is carrying a heavy load, but I find them harder to walk in and also a little easier to fall. The long “tails” on my shoes provides some stability, and particularly help to prevent falling backwards. As you can see from the photo on the left, you do still sink down a bit through soft snow. That path has been walked over twice — coming and going. It’s already a little packed. A couple of more trips or so, and I’d actually be able to walk over my own trail just in boots. When we used to cross-country ski, we sometimes set our own track through soft, deep snow by walking around the farm in snowshoes first. Like all bright dogs, Sabrina knows enough to walk behind us when we’re out snowshowing through deep snow. I once had a real smarty-pants dog — a big husky — that used to like to sneak up and stand on the back end of my snowshoes whenever I stopped. I wouldn’t notice and would then try to step forward and end up falling when the snowshoe wouldn’t move!
Now, for the demonstration movie!! I shot this little .mp4 clip while out in the field this morning. It’s about 1.3MB in size. Just a little sidenote to this. It’s not as easy as you might think to look down at your feet to shoot a movie while walking in snowshoes. I *almost* lost my balance right at the end of this clip! Hope you enjoy this virtual snowshoe walk Wayne!