How to Snowshoe Series: Mastering Snowshoeing Techniques for Winter Hiking

Movement.

It’s freeing. It’s a joy to feel your body working towards your mind’s commands. And when you are exercising in the outdoors, you get to experience those moments when all your faculties are working together: muscles stretching and flexing, your breath, your blood pumping, your eyes and ears taking in the surroundings, your brain processing it all and plotting the route… or even just the next step.

And the more you do it, the more you get to have these experiences with whole being working in harmony, as it was intended.

So, the winter time shouldn’t stop us from having those experiences. That’s why we recommended snowshoeing as a ‘low barrier-to-entry’ activity to allow you and the family to keep getting out, experiencing nature, experiencing connection, and - yes - experiencing this freedom that comes with movement over wide spaces.

Snowshoeing is a comparatively low barrier-to-entry activity because it is both low cost and also pretty easy to do proficiently.

Like anything, there is a big gap between proficient and mastery (just look at those who race on snowshoes or those who need them as a means of transportation as part of day-to-day life). But it’s really pretty basic. You walk. you walk with much bigger “feet,” but you walk.

I think that’s part of the beauty of it, though. In a world of “Xtreme” (you can’t use the “E” when you are talking about things like this), there is elegance in bringing things back to basics… a grace to making an activity more about who you are with than how “bad ass” what you are doing is… a joy to creating ease when we typically celebrate overcoming difficulty.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not so simple that it doesn’t come with risks. But the risks are usually in the cold and the isolation, not in the act of moving. (You can think of something like inbounds skiing as being the opposite of this risk profile.) But because the movements are simple, they can be deceptive in their nuances. Getting up off of a floor that can be so powdery that it is effectively sinking beneath your weight can actually prove quite difficult; it’s easy to have your grippy snowshoes turn into slippery “foot sleds” when you are on hillside, if you don’t know what you are doing. Those are just a couple of examples.

Just as with anything else, the more you do it and the more you learn, the more you will come to realize that there are hidden pieces of knowledge and competence that you can delve into.

Hopefully, our little series on snowshoeing has gone a long way to exposing those typically hidden nuances. We hope that the knowledge reveals a depth of experience that you can have, even if that depth is about experiencing simplicity rather than complication and approachability rather than exclusivity.

The outdoors don’t have to be Xtreme. In fact, if every outdoor endeavor is an attempt to outdo the pervious one, I would argue we are on an unsustainable path for not only ourselves (who are very likely to get hurt or even killed) but also for the spread and sharing of our collective experiences with nature.

Nature isn’t defined by audacity. It is defined by the connection we all can have with it.