My First Pair of Snowshoes

by Carl Heilman II

It was in the early 1970's when I moved here to the Adirondacks. I wasn't a total stranger to the region though, since I had been coming here for vacation with my parents for as long as I could remember. This was to be a totally new experience however, since this time I was on my own about to try to fend for myself. I guess that at the time I was what a lot of the locals here call a 'flatlander', having had little experience with the skills needed to live in the mountains... In more recent years, some of those same locals have mentioned they expected I'd never last through my first winter on my own up here.

My first summer came and went and was a real memorable time...being able to live in this vacation land...fishing, swimming, and recreating as I pleased. I started learning about life in the mountains and just how different it was from the moderately sized farming community I had grown up in. Little did I know at the time how much 'growing up' I still had to do. At 18 you feel like the whole world is at your fingertips and there isn't a thing that you can't do! Well, I should have been watching the signs a little closer and taking advice from the squirrels and chipmunks who were busily putting away their stores of food for the winter. I didn't realize at the time, but one thing I wasn't going to do was make it through the winter on what stores I had put by.

Fall came and the trees put on their finest show of the year while the nights grew frosty and the north winds blew over the lake. I had started to cut my firewood for the winter and by the time the first snows came, I thought for sure I had plenty of wood to keep the house warm for the long winter ahead. Well, the long cold December nights began to take their toll on the woodpile and by Christmas I realized there was a lot of work to do yet... Then the nights grew even colder in January. When the temperature outside reached about 40 below, I think there was as much frost on the inside walls of my uninsulated house as there was on the outside! And so, most of my spare time during first winter here was spent with the chain saw and dragging out what good firewood there was near the road on our woodlot.

Spring has a way of softening even the harshest memories of winter, but I did make a vow to get my work for next winter done ahead of time so that I could enjoy myself in the next snow season ahead. Spring oozed into bug season, and then summer once again chilled to autumn before I started to gather my wood for the winter. This time though, knowing what to expect, I cut an adequate supply of wood and started pursuing a means of enjoying the coming snowfalls.

The idea of snowshoeing was already in my blood. Perhaps the thought was planted years before, having been weaned on Sgt. Preston of the Yukon. I had been thinking seriously about making snowshoes ever since coming to visit here during a Christmas vacation when I was 16. That was the year of the great snowfalls...the winter of 1970-71. The snow was waist deep powder and still coming strong when we decided we'd better head back south for home. Without snowshoes, there was no way to really enjoy the snow anyhow! We managed to get caught in a traffic jam on the NYS Thruway and in Penna. we spent the night in a schoolhouse because the roads were closed ... but that is a whole different story!

Before making a pair of snowshoes, I checked on some in the local stores. I realized that with my funds, or rather lack of them, that if I was going to have a pair of snowshoes, it was going to be by my own creation. Being a do-it-yourselfer, I really wanted to make them on my own anyhow. I pored and studied through the few materials I had accumulated over the years on snowshoe making and then started looking to the woods for the perfect snowshoe tree. White ash was the suggested wood. This was where I began to realize how much of an education still lay ahead since I didn't know a white ash from a black ash from a beech... So, I thought the best alternative would be to go to the local hardwood mill to pick out a rough sawn ash board. They'd know what white ash was!

Well, the local mill didn't have any ash, but they did have white birch and said I could look through the pile as long as I kept it neat. I'm too much of a perfectionist I guess, because I looked through the whole pile and found only one board that was satisfactory. So, it was back to the woods. One book I had suggested birch was the best so I headed back to the woodlot armed with my chain saw. I might not have known what white ash was, but I did know what white birch was and if that was all I could get at the mill, then a split log from the woods should be fine.

I wandered all over our woodlot before coming back to the first tree I had considered. It was the 'perfect' snowshoe tree with a straight clean trunk, nicely drooping branches, and right near the road, too! My visions of having to carry each split section a half mile out of the woods disappeared as I set about notching and felling the birch. As the chain saw neared the back of the notch, the few remaining wood fibers started snapping as the tree started falling toward the slight opening in the woods.

As I watched the uppermost branches gracefully start arching toward the ground, a sudden sickening feeling came over me as I realized they weren't heading for the ground, but instead were heading directly for the utility lines along the edge of the road... I expected to soon see snapping and popping live wires dancing about in the road, but instead, one eternal second later, my tree was held well above the ground, cradled by the same wires. I now felt quite lucky since the lines were still in one piece. So, my thoughts then rapidly progressed from, 'My snowshoe tree!', to thinking of my own safety, to 'What should I do next?'! You're not supposed to touch a tree over the power lines, right? So, I headed home to call the power company and let them take care of it...

After I had called and had once again parked by the scene of the crime, along comes a local fellow who says, "That's no power line, that's a telephone line!" He quickly proceeded to cut the tree from the line like this thing happened all the time, and I finally had my snowshoe tree on the ground. I had split the tree and was on my way back down the hill with it when here comes the power truck up the hill. Not knowing how to best handle the situation, I waved and kept on going...

Back home, I split the tree into smaller pieces, feeling a bit like Abe Lincoln. Then I set to work pretty much as I still do, using a circular saw to rip a snowshoe bow from the split log. In the meantime, I also put together a form to bend the 13 by 48 inch snowshoes that were recommended for a person my weight back then. I've come to realize since then that whoever made up those recommendations obviously hadn't spent much time climbing in the mountains!

Shaving the bow to size was a real trick since I had no shaving horse to hold the wood while I worked it with a drawshave. So, I clamped the bow to the side porch railing, worked about a foot of it, then reclamped it, and worked it some more until I finally had it shaped to size. A lot of work had gone into those 2 finely tapered pieces of wood by that point and I somehow just couldn't imagine bending them around the forms I had made so that the two ends would meet together as a tail.

The steamer was a rather crude affair. It was a 10 foot long square ended box of wood that was pieced together since I didn't have enough wood to make all sides full length. The teakettle cooked away at a rousing boil on the electric range and steam not only poured out of the small hole at the end of the box, but from quite a number of unplanned vents all along the box. I let the bows 'cook' for the suggested time of a bit over an hour and then bade the spirits to let those fine sticks of wood be limber enough to bend around the forms.

I had to bend a lot more snowshoes before I got over the awe of bending a piece of wood in a tight curve around a form without hearing a dreadful splintering sound. Ten minutes later a pair of freshly bent snowshoe frames were in their forms, beginning the next step...drying. Meanwhile, I got together the crossbars and readied everything for the final steps.

Once dry, the final processes before lacing were basic woodworking techniques. After balancing the shoes the crossbars were mortised into the frame. Then the toe and heel sections were drilled for the lacing. Finally all the rough edges were rolled over and smoothed, and the frame was given a couple coats of varnish.

I don't remember how many times I laced in each section of the snowshoe. I do remember a lot of looking at the diagrams in the book, then looking at what I had laced, and ripping out what I had just done, before doing it all over again. There was at least as much time in the lacing of that first pair of snowshoes as there was in the whole rest of the process!

I do remember a real sense of accomplishment while snowshoeing on that first pair of snowshoes. Not only was the snowshoeing more special on my handmade snowshoes, but there was a real special feeling for me as a neophyte from the 'flatlands' being able to make something useful from a tree in the woods.

I was hooked on the sport from the first time I slipped my felt pacs into the crude bindings I had made. Rapidly progressing in difficulty, I went from a several mile walk behind the house to a bushwack up Pharoah Mtn. I learned my first lesson about how hard it is to climb in steep powder snow with shoes that large near the summit of Pharoah. I also learned how difficult it is to walk in the same deep powder without them because that was the only way I could get up that last short steep section at the top.

That day on Pharoah was one of those idyllic winter days with a bright blue sky and an incredibly bright white snow capping over all the mountains. The fire tower at the summit provided for incredible views in all directions. To the south lay the Pharoah Wilderness with the mountains of the Lake George region beyond. To the west was Schroon Lake and the Hoffman region, and to the northwest were the Adirondack High Peaks, an impressive range of mountains capped with brilliant snow and ice. I was determined that was where my next snowshoe excursion would be.

Next weekend found me climbing Algonquin, the second highest peak in the Adirondacks. Anxious to reach the summit, I maintained a rapid pace until near timberline. Here I caught up with a mountaineering group from the Syracuse area. The slower pace gave me more opportunity to check out the views and the incredible landscape. All the trees and rocks at this elevation were covered with a thick buildup of rhime...feathery, eerie fingers of frost that gave the region a fairyland appearance. Beyond, the snowy mountains rolled off into the distance.

At timberline the leader of the group suggested everyone stop to gear up for the wind ahead and put on their crampons. Well, I did stop to put on some extra clothes, but I couldn't put on crampons because I didn't even know what they were, much less have some to put on! So, I set out ahead on my own. One thing I've since learned through experience is how little experience I had at that time for what I was attempting to do. Never having been above timberline before, I knew nothing about rock cairns. Since we were the first ones up that day the wind had obliterated any other signs of a trail. So, I headed up what seemed like the most direct route to the summit. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, right?! Not if it takes you across the steep NE face of Algonquin...

The snow was dense, windblown and covered with a slightly yielding crust. Crampons or small mountaineering snowshoes would have performed perfectly, but my large Maine style shoes provided no traction at all. The result was a sudden unplanned glissade down the steep snow gully. My stomach churned and my heart pounded furiously as I grasped at the icy surface with mittens and toes as I tried to keep myself from careening wildly down the chute to what seemed like a bottomless abyss far below. Tales of mountaineering accidents quickly filled my head, and the possibility of becoming a statistic myself suddenly came to mind...

The friction of my knees, toes, arms, and mittens on the crusty surface finally slowed me to a halt. I took off my snowshoes to gain better purchase on the steep slope, and took a couple minutes to gain some semblance of composure. Then, using the snowshoes as ski poles, by holding the frames near the toe hole area and using the tails to dig into the crust, I gingerly worked my way back to the spot I had left the mountaineering group. From there I uneventfully followed their footsteps up to the summit.

Being on the summit for the first time was an incredible experience. A weather system was moving in and the wind was blowing over the summit with incredible force...fast enough so that I could stand on a rock at the top and lean into the wind. With the glistening, snowcapped High Peaks at all sides and the wind roaring past me like a freight train, I could almost feel like I was actually flying... Mentally I guess I really was...

The rest of the day was uneventful, but was just an incredible experience. Having seemingly boundless energy, I climbed over to Iroquois, back over Algonquin, and also did Wright's Peak before heading back out for the day. I had learned some important lessons that day and had an excellent time out, too. This was just the first of many more climbs I've taken in the region. On the rest though, I've been much better prepared with both equipment and knowledge for the terrain I was heading into. This and other experiences have helped lead me in my current directions with the snowshoe workshops, etc. I enjoy teaching others how to safely start winter climbing and how to avoid some of the problems I've experienced over the years. Snowshoeing and skiing through the winter woods is an incomparable experience that with a good background and the proper equipment can be richly rewarding.

Those first large snowshoes put me on top of many an Adirondack High Peak the first couple years I went climbing, but have now been retired to a place of prominence above our bow window that looks out over Brant Lake. Modern styled smaller shoes help my maturing limbs climb with the same ease I had climbed with years back now. I still find the same enjoyment and stimulation from climbing on my Catpaws, but have never felt quite the same excitement as I did when climbing on my first pair of snowshoes...