they are very limited but if you don't have them when you need them you could be in a real fix."stove pipeing" thru fresh deep snow to get back to the car,camp,help--whatever,would drain your energy fast.i do a fair amount of snow shoeing as a sport,a kind of winter hiking,and once you get the hang of it you can really move right along.i'm sort of down on some of the styles of modern shoes.they don't have a big enough foot print to really hold you up.my wife got a pair of the newer ones and even although she is smaller and light in weight she sinks in more than I do with my bulk on my older style wood frame ones.
My wife and I use aluminum shoes these days. Hers are smaller than mine, as she weighs less. I also have a pair of traditional rawhide laced shoes from my youth. They are works of art and still in pretty good shape, so I hung them on the wall. I will readily admit that the old shoes work well and have a nostalgic appeal, harking back to the days of Father Baraga and the fur trappers and natives of the Hudson Bay Co days.
The main drawback of aluminum shoes is that they are noisy on packed trails. In my opinion the ratchet bindings are far superior to anything you could use on ash/rawhide shoes, and they excel on ice because of the built-in crampons.
When I go late season hunting on packed logging roads up north, I take my wifes' smaller shoes and bungee them to the sides of my pack. They're so light I forget that they're there until I hit a trail that has heavy snow.
Canoedogs calls out the problem of 'postholing'.....any snowshoe beats postholing which saps energy at a dangerous rate.
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