Snow- pillowy, enveloping, muffling, softening the world and making it new, making it another place, inviting exploration, transfiguring the ordinary and enticing the eye with plays of light and shadow, curves and edgings, hiding shadows and erasing the surface beneath. Or perhaps amplifying it with echoes in ways to make it mysterious and challenging to read. Negotiating snowy landscapes- new ways of locomotion, the potential of skis, snowshoes, and sleds. Some paths become easier, some much harder. And snow has myriad textures depending on wind, air and surface temperatures, intensity of sunlight, and history of the snowpack. Today the first heavy snowdump here at -11°C or so inspired me to dig out skis for the first time, rush to the ravine and ski down the [paved, multiuse] trail [the bike highway which denies winter to enable wheeled communte transport to downtown Edmonton] and set tracks in the openings in the valley of Mill Creek below. If they didn’t normally plow and sand this long grade I would ski it daily all winter long.
Skis are very practical ways to move over country under winter conditions. They enable the human user to take advantage of reduced friction and surface roughness to multiply the propulsive impulse of his or her muscles; the pointed poles provide traction where needed. Saami invented skis as a way to move through the taiga with their herds of reindeer.
In North America, a different solution to cross-country movement in a snow covered winter landscape was invented: the snowshoe. Traditional snowshoes are bent wooden frames netted with babiche (stretched rawhide) or other hide cordage, or sometimes apparently with plant material. These are affixed to the wearer’s feet to enable floatation, permitting the walker to avoid sinking down deeply in deep soft snows. I recall once a gruelling traverse across a snowy slope in the West Kootenays across deep soft snow coming back from a long cross country hike begun on the frozen weight-supporting spring crust of morning…..the return journey, though downhill, was exhausting, and very slow. We were down off the mountain close to midnight, having descended most of the way by starlight and feel. There are First Nations tales of the discovery of snowshoes. These enable winter hunting, moving from camp to camp, and greatly extend the range of human travellers in the Canadian forests. Not only do the shoes enable the human walkers to move over the snow, but they create trails over which dogs can pull toboggans, enabling the transportation of camping gear or other cargo, such as the meat harvested by hunters. In the winter in the North the swamps, lakes and rivers are converted into open trails and highways once they freeze sufficiently. Impassable alder thickets become open meadows, easy to traverse over top of the tangled stems.
Snowshoes come in many designs and webbing patterns, enabling travel over different types of snow conditions, in different terrain, and utilizing different locally available materials. My first encounter with Native made snowshoes was in the mid 1970s just after the birth of my daughter. One of the women who worked at the college where my then husband and I taught was the daughter of a skilled snowshoe maker. Percy made shoes for me and my husband out of local Rocky Mountain maple (
Acer glabrum var.
douglasii) and webbed them with caribou (Allen’s shoes) or deer (my shoes) babiche for the fine filling in the front and rear sections of the shoes, with heavier cow hide strips in the centre under the foot. The shoes had almost parallel sides, like the form of “Sherpa” snowshoes, and were decorated with red and black coloured woolen pom-poms. Do I have to have these, I asked Percy. Yes, he answered. He later commented that these coloured balls help to prevent snowblindness. He showed us a binding which allowed one to slip into the shoes without buckles. Some years later after I began ethnobotany research I was able to visit Percy in his home village of Kispiox and interviewed him about snowshoe making. I was permitted to photograph him doing fine filling.
Percy commented that the rounded toe of the distinctive Gitxsan design allows the toe of the shoe to ride high to avoid toeing in (and falling) while avoiding bruising the shin and knee, which pointed toe designs may do. The balance of Percy’s snowshoes is amazing; the shoes pivot to bring toe up, and short tail down at each step.
This photo (left) is one of my snowshoes showing the binding and my canvas boot. If snowshoe crampons are needed, as often in the mountainous terrain of the Gitxsan homeland, a short length of spruce stem with spike branches pointing down into the snow is lashed under the pivot point. Below is a shot of me and my daughter snowshoeing on our land in the late 1980s.
The neighbouring Witsuwit’en also make these round toed snowshoes, but more often make a traditional Dene style of pointed snowshoe. (see a pair photographed in Ron Sebastian's Hazelton Gallery in 2005 below)
I learned words for these types of snowshoes, and for the fine and coarse filling. I also learned about how to make emergency snowshoes of a hoop of red willow.The excellence of the local small maples for snowshoe making is reflected in the fact that the Witsuwit’en word for snowshoe, ‘ayh is also the name given to the maple. Maple shoes are strong and won’t break, but they are heavy. A tough small pine will make lighter snowshoes and the “fuzzing” of the softer wood will make them less prone to slipping, though they must be replaced more often.
Travelling to the Yukon in the early 1980s Allen and I encountered snowshoes with birch frames and quite a different webbing pattern. These were of the pointed toe overall shape, but the webbing under the foot was an open rectangular pattern, and the webbing was a distinctive cured caribou hide. We stopped in Teslin where the best snowshoes were said to come from and interviewed two snowshoe makers about how the snowshoes were made and the hide for webbing prepared. We ordered a pair of Teslin snowshoes to enable us to repay those we spoke with, and also to possess a pair of these remarkable shoes.
Some years later, in winter of 2000 I had the opportunity to see and to try Gwich'in snowshoes, intended for the fine powdery snows of the low Arctic taiga and alpine tundra. Wonderful snowshoes of large area, high upturn with rounded toes, and very fine filling. I found them remarkable to walk in, enabling good steady gate across or along the frozen river.
The photo of Gwich'in snowshoes was taken in the band office at Fort McPherson in December 1999.
In Edmonton, skis are usually more sensible than my snowshoes. I’ve only really used them two or three winters out of about 23. Now I see people wearing snowshoes that are high tech creations of completely different design and intent, like my cross-country skis, something for urban recreationists to use for outdoor exercise and fun.
