i went hiking with riz_aaroni and gonadz earlier today but i knew riz didn't have snow shoes and the area we were going have a patch of bamboos so i thought this was the perfect timing! here i am harvesting some fallen, bent, or almost dead bamboos. from my childhood growing up in the philippines, i knew bamboos whether dead or still green, pretty much retained it's flexibility.
we setup camp and i started splitting the bamboo. they were only mostly 1" in diameter but even then i knew i could split them up and still retained much of their strength. this enabled me to get a much wider surface area to distribute my weight (currently 5'9", 177 lbs) while keeping the shoes as light as possible. after splitting most of them i started jumping up and down on the pile and barely made any marking on the snow below, so that's when i knew i had just the right amount of bamboo.
here's one shoe done. after a quick test i knew it was enough to hold my weight front to back but there was a small side to side flexing which kinda caused me to have the tendency to tip over on the side if i leaned on one shoe over another a tad too much.
...so i started shaving the rest of the bamboos until i can bend them pretty much in a semi-circle without snapping and started weaving them in and out around the main frame.
after weaving as much bamboos as i can i tested it again...much more stable now. as an added bonus, all that weaving really puts a lot of pressure on the paracord knots so there's no way they're coming loose now! so i skipped adding more paracord to it since it wasn't needed.
next step was i secured my boots to the shoes via paracord looped through my boots' shoe laces. the pic doesn't show it but i also tied the tail end of the snow shoes to my boots although a little loosely than the front. this created a hinge effect similar to professional-made snow shoes. from my brief experience with snow shoes, the tail end usually gets dragged anyway so long as the nose of the shoes are raised enough with each step it's good.
after walking about 50 or so ft (gonadz was taking a pic of me while walking so if i have enough pics under the limit i might include it here later to show the snow behind me was barely disturbed) i stopped since when i looked behind me i could barely see any markings on the snow at all. i knew the shoes were doing their job because of it and the ease i was walking. in this pic there are several things going on:
1. as soon as i stepped off the snow shoe my foot sank about 6" in the snow. had i been walking without my make-shift snow shoes on, no doubt i would've sank even deeper.
2. the circled area shows the only marking of the snow shoe on the snow. i'm actually surprised at how little mark i left behind.
3. while doing this contest, i learned that if i ever find myself in an e&e scenario and have enough time, i'd ditch the commercial snow shoes (they leave tell-tale oval shape and very deep claw marks on the snow) and opt to make my own bamboo shoes instead. those horizontal marks made on the snow were a lot lighter than the fallen twigs/branches that fall on the snow (marked by the 3 arrows). a slight dusting of snow or depending on the amount of light available would've clearly covered my tracks from the ones tracking me (i hope). with minimized tracks left on the snow and coupled with jeff's advice on making j-turns, i have a much better chance of evading capture.
another pic showing how deep my foot print is with and without the snow shoes on.
here it is in action (thanks to gonadz for taking the pics).
thanks for the contest and the opportunity for esee gear! :thumbup:
