Learning to stay above it

Shedding its clumsy wood-and-leather image, snowshoeing has deftly stepped into the mainstream over the last decade. Credit updated, lighter equipment — molded plastic snowshoes with neoprene-covered nylon decks and lacings — for boosting the number of American snowshoers to 1.4 million in 2003 (up from 400,000 in 1992).

This thorough guide — itself an updated edition of the classic by snowshoe guru Gene Prater, who died in 1993 — offers a range of advice including the proper way to choose a snowshoe, step over logs and other obstacles, and forward powder progress.

Sections on bindings, clothing, technique and safety cover advances in those areas. Yet for all the innovation, it’s the sense of timelessness, the unique communion with the season that lies beneath the sport’s enduring appeal.

As Felkley writes in the preface: “Although new ideas and equipment have been important, the basic principles of snowshoeing … are the same after 6,000 years. And the snowflakes of winter have not changed at all.”

— Chuck Thompson