Snowshoeing in Europe

We were skiing in Crested Butte, Co in 1995. Standing at the mountain base , I saw a young girl running down the mountain on snowshoes. All she was wearing was a sweatshirt, sweatpants and running shoes attached to her snowshoes. My eyes lit up and, under his breath, the ex-Marine muttered “I think she’s found another sport for us to do”. How right he was! It turned out she was a member of the ski team and every morning they ran up the mountain and down the mountain for endurance.

All you need is equipment (we use Atlas Snowshoes), hiking poles (our choice is “Leki”) and you are ready!

We took a lesson at Crested Butte and decided that just walking along in the snow was too easy and a little boring. It would be a lot more fun, not to mention a challenge, to hike UP, the mountain with snowshoes on (of course that was my idea) – and that was the beginning of our new sport.

The new snowshoes are a far cry from the old, wooden, tennis racket style. These are made of titanium and very light.

We prefer to snowshoe in Europe for many reasons: airfares are cheap in the Winter time; you can hike up a mountain, down the other side into another valley and take bus or train transportation back to your start point; the hiking poles collapse and fit right into our 26″ suitcases along with the snowshoes; there are no lift prices; hotels with half-board (huge buffet breakfasts and dinner) are much less expensive than even a motel in the United States.

And, the big plus, we can exercise outdoors and burn off calories! Unfortunately, we have discovered that the ex-marine and I can eat up to and beyond ANY CALORIE we could possibly expend. The wine and food is too good and I cannot pass a pastry shop without leaving drool marks on the window and buying something (or somethings).

We pick a different ski resort most years, situate ourselves at one hotel and head out every morning to snowshoe up and down a mountain, always staying on the side of a trail so as not to impede any skiers. Sometimes, we take a gondola down if the going up was long and tough. In the last few years, we’ve started to see other snowshoers besides us. But we still hear, “Vas is Das?” and get big thumbs-up from the Europeans.

Rent some from your local ski shop and give it a try. You too may have a whole new sport. It is something you can do on only a few inches of snow so “almost non-existant snow conditions” are removed from the sport. Let me know what you think. Good Luck! And more on our plans to snowshoe at Zermatt later……