For the first time this year, I went snowshoeing on Mount Hood in Oregon. I have frequently snowshoed in the Cascade Mountains in both Oregon and Washington for both pleasure and work. Prior to my trip I had tested, inspected, and performed maintenance on all my gear. Some of my equipment is over thirty years old. Both the bindings and the snowshoes I was using were purchased back in the early 1970s. The bindings are leather and starting to show signs of wear. This year instead of treating the bindings with Snow Seal, I used Danner’s Boot Conditioner. When treated, they looked new. I still took lamp wicking as emergency bindings just in case.

During the trip my boots came out of the bindings. I thought they had broken, but no, they were loose. I retighten them and continued on. Well this kept happening as if I was in a cartoon. I finally had to resort tp punching new holes in the straps because the leather continued to stretch. I never did revert to the emergency bindings, but I spent quite a bit of time with my butt higher than my head. When I bought my last pair of Danner boots, they had warned me that the conditioner I also purchased “could”stretch leather but I had no idea.

The trip was to have beed a training session on winter survival sponsored by the Forest Service but no one showed up. So I spent a beautiful snowy day snowshoeing with all my impressive survival equipment out in the woods with a pretty, young, female Forest Service Volunteer. But I don’t think I impressed her since I kept having to reattach my bindings like a three year old kid trying to learn to tie his shoes. Sometimes life is just not fair.