politburo diktat 2.0

My family took a short vacation in New Hampshire this past week, visiting my sister in North Conway. We all did some cross-country skiing, some shopping, and too much eating; my daughter and her friend also went downhill skiing and skating. I discovered snowshoeing this trip and really enjoyed it.

Starting with the equipment, “this ain’t your father’s snowshoe,” the Tubbs Sojourn snowshoe: metal, plastic, lightweight, and high-tech. The main idea of a snowshoe, to keep your foot from sinking into the snow, is a function of how big the big flat “shoe” part is. At the retailer, they had a very clever scale, not measured in possibly embarrassing pounds, but simply marked off in snowshoe size. While my wife and I both measured in the low 30-inch range, the salesman offered her a pair of 25’s, and handed me the 30’s, and turned down my request for smaller ones. Something about “You can break trail for her.” Gee, thanks.

If you know nothing about snowshoes and imagine that they magically hold you up along the very top of the snow, forget it. They are not anti-gravity levitation devices. However, they do permit you to walk along conveniently, only dipping 8 to 12 inches into the snow (more deeply into soft powder, less deeply into denser stuff).

The next part of the modern snowshoe is the hinge for your booted foot. Maybe the old native American snowshoes had something similar. But when you think about it, the snowshoe absolutely must have some way to let the walker lift and bend his foot, without dragging a rigidly fixed snowshoe through the same motion. Without this articulation, the walker must lift his knee awkwardly high each step to avoid digging the front of the shoe into the snow.

The last feature that was new to me was the crampon under each foot: big, serrated steel teeth to dig firmly into almost any surface. Very cool. Of course all of this “equipment” is just to make people who are really just walking around in the snow feel cool and have some “equipment” to talk about.

I went on the trails maintained by the Jackson Ski Touring Foundation (JSTF), mainly the easy ones along the Ellis River near my sister’s house. While a few trails are mixed use, most are distinctly maintained for cross-country skiing or for snowshoeing. The ski trails are 15 feet wide, smoothly graded, even with closely parallel ski tracks neatly Zambonied into the surface.

The snowshoe trails are narrower and are just modest pathways in the snow, with tracks about one foot deep and about two feet wide. While the tracks look capable of supporting people in ordinary boots, and in places will do so, usually a boot will punch through, and serious snowshoe-ers hate the resultant “postholes.” … umm … So don’t do that.

Now comes self-contradictory part that seems to accompany almost any of these outdoor activities. If you stay in the well-packed snowshoes tracks, it’s remarkably like walking along the sidewalk. You really do not sink in at all, and you can stomp along to your heart’s content, reveling in the fact that you are out in the winter, and using your “equipment, too.” So, most of us (I think) yearn to cut out on our own, breaking a new trail. Heh. That gets tiring fairly quickly. I must digress for a bit and point out that, in any area wilder than Central Park, I don’t go off trail, summer or winter, using or not using any equipment. If the trail goes “here,” and doesn’t go “there,” there is almost certainly a reason for that. Thus, when the trails have all been well-trodden, but I felt the urge to “do some real snowshoeing,” I would branch off 50 or 100 yards, keeping some distinctive landmark of the trail ahead (a hillock or a stand of birches) in view, and curve around towards it. If I then came to the established trail sooner, I had established a “shortcut.” If I came back to the established trail later, then I had established a “scenic route.” All of which are wonderfully ephemeral, as they will disappear with the next snowfall.