The LightDec – Mar

Snowshoe under the Lights

Four minutes to learn

Snowshoes take about four minutes to learn and no fitness you do not already have. You walk slightly wider than normal and that is the technique. Anyone who can manage an hour on a footpath can manage this.

What they buy you is access. Off the packed track the snow is thigh-deep and impassable on foot; on snowshoes it holds you, and the places worth standing in on a clear night are precisely the ones with no track to them. A frozen lake, a clearing, the top of a low rise with the trees below you.

Going under your own power also means going quietly. No engine, no headlights, and after the first ten minutes your eyes have adjusted and the head torches go off. People talk less. That happens on its own.

Short on purpose

The walk is short on purpose — usually under an hour out — because the point is to arrive somewhere and stop, not to cover ground. Sweating into your layers and then standing still in it is the one genuine mistake available on a night like this.

So you go slowly, you arrive not quite warm, and then you put on the jacket that has been in the bag rather than on your back. Guides here are almost tediously insistent about this, and they are right.

There is a fire at the other end and something hot, and then however long the sky is worth. If it does nothing, you have still walked into a silent forest at night, which is not a consolation prize.

Build a journey around this View Our Journeys

All experiences