Our First Time Snowshoeing
We’ve been wanting to find a good winter sport for a few years now. We’ve tried downhill skiing which can be fun but it’s a full day commitment and has a lot of associated costs with gear and lift tickets. We also took a cross country skiing lesson last winter and really enjoyed it. It’s quite a bit cheaper than downhill skiing which is great but is best done on groomed trails or with more confidence going back country than we have right now. It can also be a bit trickier to find places to go where we can take Atlas and requires a decent amount of snow.
After a lot of discussions we decided that snowshoeing had the lowest cost barrier, is easy to do locally, and we can take Atlas without any issues. Neither of us had been snowshoeing but we made the decision to go to our local winter gear shop and purchased snowshoes, boots, and poles!
The hardest thing about deciding where to go is that unlike ski resorts, most trails don’t publish snow reports so you just have to choose one and hope for the best. We checked several trail reviews online and chose one fairly near some other options so if it didn’t work out we could bail and try another trail.
One thing we learned from cross country skiing is that many layers are better than a couple bulky layers so we layered up and hit the trail! We ended up picking the perfect day to go - snow on the ground, sunny, and warm!
Key takeaways:
You can take snowshoeing lessons and I’m sure we would learn things but it’s totally doable with no experience/instruction
It’s harder than normal hiking. The weight of the shoes and added resistance of the snow make your legs burn out faster than you might expect. Choose a trail that you would normally classify as easy to moderate for your first time out.
Have a dog? Take him! Again, it will just feel like hiking to him but picking up his feet in the snow will tire him out quickly!
