Snowshoe Revival Thanks To High-Tech Designs And Lower Prices, Ancient Method Of Getting Around Is Attracting New Enthusiasts

Hanging in a North Woods cabin, Grandpa’s snowshoes are things of handwrought beauty, poetry in ash wood and rawhide.

But on the feet, they’re work. For first-timers, they’re more like misery.

If snowshoes hadn’t turned ugly - in a machine-made, high-tech sort of way - hundreds of thousands of new enthusiasts would never have discovered just how beautiful the sport can be.

With aluminum frames and synthetic fabric decks, nouveau snowshoes weigh half as much as their ancestors and other design innovations make them much more user-friendly.

They’re cheaper, too, with entry-level shoes selling for around $100, down from twice as much a few years ago.

A pair of ski poles is all the additional equipment you need. Low-end telescoping poles, which can change in length for varying conditions, go for about $50.

“It’s just incredible, how easy it is,” Kent Myers says. “Two steps, and you’re an expert.”

Myers is a senior vice president of Vail Associates. This season Colorado’s enormous Vail ski resort opened a ridgetop area dedicated to snowshoeing, with 16 miles of trails. In other resorts, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing coexist, but not on the same paths. Snowshoers can spoil the tracks set for cross-country.

Vail’s snowshoers ride up to the new area on lifts, alongside downhill skiers. But then they walk away from the ski traffic.

“Five minutes, and you’re in the wilderness,” Myers says.

Vail’s lift-served snowshoeing is a definitive sign that this 6,000-year-old activity, which enabled humankind to live in the world’s snowiest places, has arrived as a serious winter sport.

A major reason it arrived is that you don’t need lifts, a mega-resort like Vail or even trails to do it.

You don’t need much of anything, except shoes and snow, to find what Coloradan Douglas Radandt of Boulder calls ecstasy.

“About five years ago, there was this whole raft of modern shoes,” Radandt, a runner and Nordic skier, says. His first outing was a wild Rocky Mountain romp.

“I was running up hills, jumping down rocks, sliding on them,” he says. “They’re so much smaller than skis and much more maneuverable.”

Still a runner and skier, Radandt is now also a serious snowshoer racer. He says competitors on a packed course can cover 10 kilometers (6.1 miles) in a half-hour or less. This is a five-minute-mile pace, beyond the capabilities of all but the best dry-pavement recreational runners.

Numbers like these, which intrigue the athletic, can strike fear into the hearts of the non-athletic. They shouldn’t. Racing is a tiny corner of the big snowshoeing picture, which is mostly regular folks walking around in snow too deep for regular walking.

As snowshoe guide and author Dave Felkley of Nederland, Colo., says, your dry-ground style of ambulation dictates your pace on snow.

“If you walk, you can go. If you hike, you can go farther. If you’re a runner, you can go faster,” Felkley says.

Felkley’s one-man Bigfoot Snowshoe Tours is one of adventuring’s most laid-back, bare-bones operations.

Felkley, who doesn’t own a car, relies on clients to pick him up and drive to trailheads in the Rockies’ front range near Boulder and Denver. He charges $20 to $30 per person for a few over-the-snow hours, picnic included, plus $10 for equipment rental.

Felkley is currently updating the authoritative how-to “Snowshoeing” by the late Gene Prater (The Mountaineers Books, $10.95).

Bargain pricing also prevails in northern New Hampshire’s Presidential Range, where the Appalachian Mountain Club offers a five-day snowshoeing camp for $290, including lessons, gear, lodgings and meals.

Victoria Hill, AMC’s workshop program manager, says participants have two days of instructional daytrips; then they put on packs and head into the remote Carter Notch Hut. Clients must be strong enough to carry a full pack, but need no experience.

Hill says AMC offers a variety of snowshoes, so clients can find what suits them best. They can even try on a piece of history: wood-and-rawhide models.

The interest in snowshoeing started showing about five years ago, Hill says. She speculates that we might be witnessing a winter sport rebellion.

“I don’t know if people are overburdened by all the equipment you need for skiing, or if the price has finally gotten to be too much for them, or if the world is just too fast,” Hill says. “People like the calm of snowshoeing. They can walk into the quiet and solitude of the woods.”

While snowshoers slow down, the pace has been increasingly frantic for manufacturers.

Perry Klehbahn, president of Atlas Snowshoe Co., says production has been doubling annually.

Atlas, in San Francisco, is No. 2 in production to Tubbs in Vermont, a 90-year-old institution.

Tubbs honors its past by making traditional shoes, but the real action has been in new-style shoes.

Jim Radtke, editor and publisher of The Snowshoer, the sport’s first national magazine, says national snowshoe output has been growing 40 percent a year and shows no signs of slowing.

The country currently has about 750,000 snowshoers, Radtke says.

This sounds like a crowd. But we all could put on snowshoes and still find solitude.

The great white hush will always be bigger than we are.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: INFORMATION For a list of 200 North American winter sport resorts and centers with snowshoe rentals and trails: The Snowshoer, P.O. Box 458, Washburn, WI 54891; (715) 373-5556. Send $2 per copy. Day trips in Colorado’s Front Range: Bigfoot Snowshoe Tours, P.O. Box 1010, Nederland, CO 80466-1010; (303) 258-3157. Five-day trips in New Hampshire’s White Mountains: Appalachian Mountain Club, Pinkham Notch Visitors Center, P.O. Box 298, Gorham, NH 03581; (603) 466-2721; tsteeves@moose.ncia.net or amcsteeves@mcimail.com To order “Showshoeing” by Gene Prater (third edition, $10.95 plus $4 shipping): The Mountaineers Books, Suite 201, 1001 Southwest Klickitat Way, Seattle, WA 98134; (800) 553-4453; mbooks@mountaineers.org