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Shoein'

When I heard "snowshoes" I immediately thought of the book White Fang. I thought of that book and old leather laces, darkened with snow melt and sweat, stiff, crackling as I bent down to "lace 'em up" and head out across the frozen tundra.

In fact, what I immediately thought of were heavy, drowned looking planks much like the ones adorning the wall of the hut where you bought your ticket and picked up your snowshoes at the Badger Pass ski area in Yosemite National Park. What I received from the ranger, working behind the counter, were anything but the forest dwellers' equivalent to cement shoes. These were super-light, very modern, very clean-looking things. Not a hint of dog spit, which, I have to admit, is what I always imagined made those archetypical snowshoes so dark.

It was a far cry from the ski rental area, in which scores of people bellied up, against all common sense, to the bar, long slabs of plastic, wood, and metal edges twirling above their heads like some psychotic circus act. So in this sense, the snowshoe rental area was considerably safer. Our small four person group collected our snowshoes, signed our paperwork (some of which may have mentioned accidental death, just like the skiing forms, but who can take those seriously when the shoes you're going to be wearing are only maybe a foot bigger than your regular shoes and look like badly damaged tennis rackets), and met outside. To demonstrate the safety of these devices in stark contrast to the ski renters a few hundred feet away, there was a minor collision between two members of our party on the way out the door, and neither person suffered any loss of limbs, or even gave thought back to the form they'd signed to see if they could remember a clause about loss of limbs.

We were greeted by Ranger Dick outside the rental hut, who was going to take us on our two hour tour up to Old Badger Summit. He explained proper snowshoe-putting on behavior and technique, which involved kneeling down in the snow a bit, there's no getting around that, so don't expect to snowshoe in your bikini, not if you have sensitive knees. Once we were all strapped in, we headed off, up the mountain.

Of course, before we could go up the mountain we had to make our way across the broad, flat expanse in front of the main ski lodge. Walking in snowshoes is a little bit like walking in flippers on dry land. Your feet are abnormally large, unwieldy, and because of this, a lot closer together than you remember. Though I didn't see any that day, I'm nearly certain this is how serious circus clowns train for those massive shoes they have to wear. If you must train for your snowshoeing before you go and do it, I recommend taking any misshapen tennis rackets you might have on hand and taping them to your foot with thick shoelaces and try walking around in a good size sandbox.

Our pack set off across the frozen tundra, January sun glinting off the flattened snow, dodging skiers the way hedgehogs dodge cars, which is to say we curled up into little balls and hoped the skiers swerved. A little like I imagined, we could track the sun rolling up above our snow plain, feeling its ebb and flow as it began to sink over the horizon. Halfway across the field I removed my outer jacket and wrapped it around my waist. My wife, notorious for feeling cold on the warmest day, should the sun duck behind a cloud for even a minute, shed her coat for the wraparound look, as well. By the time we reached the treeline the bulk of the group had shed their outerwear, except for one sub-pack of three people who were either from an equatorial country or were simply robots the park rangers had programmed to make up numbers for their snowshoeing tours and bundled in layer after layer of winter coats.

It turns out we hadn't been shoeing for hours, it was only thirty minutes in. The ranger led us a few hundred yards up into the trees, which seemed to pass quite a bit quicker than the trek across the base area. In and amongst the trees the snowshoes proved their worth, where deep holes could be seen reaching a few feet down into the snow drifts the shoes simply sunk in a half a foot or so, but kept you relatively out of the thick of it. It wasn't quite the sensation of walking on solid ground, but more like walking on very loose trampolines someone had taken great care to lay all over the forest floor. At this stage, in the shade of some mossy trees, the ranger stopped and gave us a brief lecture which enthralled and enlightened us. To be honest, he could have talked at length about drywall and plastering, and we would have been enthralled, if only to take a little break. As it was, he talked about the animals living in the surrounding snow pack. He demonstrated each animal he was referring to by pulling a stuffed version from his coat and placing them on his shoulders, tucking them in his breast pocket, draping them across the brim of his ranger's hat.

After the somewhat morbid lesson about where the creatures go to hide, what they drink, and where at least one of each winds up, if it happens to not manage to keep itself warm during the winter months, we began our ascent up the mountain to Old Badger Summit. For whatever reason, perhaps the growing fear of our ranger's penchant for taxidermy and how far it might extend, the climb up the mountain wasn't nearly as difficult as the beginning and we reached the summit inside another forty five minutes or so. We were allowed to take off the shoes and go tromping around in the hard packed snow at the peak, the culmination of which was a further little peak of about ten feet high that you get the feeling someone made out of the plowed out path for the cross country skiers to give a real definite sense of accomplishment, instead of reaching a summit which appeared to be simply another, higher flat field than the one we'd set out from down by the lodge.

After cavorting on the top of the hill, we strapped our snowshoes back on our feet, and the ranger led us in a race down a clear expanse of hill, which looked like one of those hills you dream of as a child: virgin, unadulterated snow, just waiting for its first footprint. Which, on a mountain like this must be anywhere from five to fifteen feet deep. But we bounded down on our magic lightweight shoes like synthetically-coated mountain goats, even the suspected robots, who had managed to peel a few layers off at the top of our climb, and now seemed a bit more human. We hit the treeline a little less like mountain goats, crashing through branches and snow drifts, tumbling into piles of metal and thermally sensible clothing, once again proving the startling difference between a snowshoe wearer pileup and, say, a skier pileup, in which someone would surely be missing a hand if a similar accident had occurred.

The climb down went much quicker, even the trek back across the field to the snowshoe rental lodge (which, granted, was made, this time, with the snowshoes off, since there was little to no danger of sinking into the very hard-packed snow down there. Still, it was a far cry of my initial vision of needing to gather the Huskies around to keep us all warm as the snows whipped around our poor troupe, discussing which person would be sacrificed for the greater good first, after, of course, we went through the dogs and maybe even boiled the straps on our snowshoes for sustenance.

15 Oct, 2007

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