A Bigger Footprint Snowshoers’ Numbers Growing

If you can walk, you can snowshoe, and it is only as challenging as you make it. “When we go out, we always say, ‘Let’s go have an adventure,”’ said Steve Zimmerman, an avid snowshoer who lives in the foothills of Washington’s Cascade Range near Lake Wenatchee.

“Normally, I like to get up high. I’m not going to be happy snowshoeing on a logging road. I want to take off and go up steep stuff to get to places you can’t get to with skis or anything else.”

For those who do not ski, snowshoes provides quick access to untrammeled, snow-covered lands, whether high on a mountaintop or through a flat grove of cottonwoods along a river.

Many recreational snowshoers are hikers seeking to extend their enjoyment of the mountains through all the seasons.

A survey by the National Sporting Goods Association in 1992 - the last year for which it has figures on the sport - showed that 444,000 Americans were active snowshoers. That’s compared with 10.8 million downhill skiers and 3.5 million cross-country skiers in ‘92.

Interst in the sport in Seattle has more than tripled in recent years, if enrollment in the Mountaineers’ snowshoeing courses is an indicator.

Interest has doubled the Spokane Parks and Recreation Department snowshoeing trips in the past two years, said Mike Aho, recreation director.

“People who might be fearful of the downhill element of cross-country skiing really appreciate snowshoeing,” he said, noting that the department filled all 10 of its trips this winter. “But I’m a cross-country skier, and I’ve found that I appreciate the slowness of snowshoeing. You really see things.”

About 18 manufacturers are making snowshoes, compared with six or seven a decade ago, said Eric Prater of Ellensburg, custom snowshoe maker and son of the late Gene Prater, considered one of the originators of modern snowshoe design.

New models represent a giant leap off a cornice from the first snowshoes, believed to have been simple planks bound to the feet of primitive people in central and northern Asia and Scandinavia, where bogs have yielded crude artifacts 4,000 to 5,000 years old.

Even these primitive devices allowed users to walk atop the snow instead of sinking with every step.

The tracks of the modern “Western” snowshoes probably first were laid in the Cascades near Ellensburg. In 1970, Gene Prater and his brother Bill, both avid mountaineers, began building snowshoes of light-but-strong tubular aluminum, which The Boeing Co. began using in aircraft during the 1960s.

That design breakthrough, coupled with a solid decking of neoprene, resulted in a smaller snowshoe weighing about one-third that of the old, cumbersome but beautiful and intricately woven bentwood-and-cowhide version.

Bill Prater formed a small company called Sherpa Snowshoes, which he sold years ago. It remains one of the top manufacturers in the country.

The Western snowshoe also features a more comfortable hinged binding that allows the heel to rise and fall, as well as claw-like cleats on the toe for traction and, on some models, the heel, too. The very lightest models weigh about 2 pounds per pair and provide the sensation of floating on the snow, at least on a well-packed or consolidated surface.

Western snowshoes are particularly suited to the heavy, wet snow typical in the Cascades, but their reduced surface area is less suited to soft and deep, dry powder.

You can even get asymmetrical models for the growing sport of snowshoe racing.

For most, however, snowshoeing is a more humble, contemplative activity in which effort is rewarded by spectacular views of snow-capped peaks.

The following fields overflowed: BYLINE = Greg Johnston Seattle Post-Intelligencer Staff writer Rich Landers contributed to this story.