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Concept
Snowshoe
Summary
Snowshoes are specialized outdoor gear for walking over snow. Their large footprint spreads the user's weight out and allows them to travel largely on top of rather than through snow. Adjustable bindings attach them to appropriate winter footwear.
Traditional snowshoes have a hardwood frame filled in with rawhide latticework. Modern snowshoes are made of lightweight metal, plastic, and other synthetic materials.
In the past, snowshoes were essential equipment for anyone dependent on travel in deep and frequent snowfall, such as fur trappers. They retain that role in areas where motorized vehicles cannot reach or are inconvenient to use. However, their greatest contemporary use is for recreation.
Snowshoeing is easy to learn and in appropriate conditions is a relatively safe and inexpensive recreational activity. However, doing so in icy, steep terrain requires both advanced skill and mountaineering-style pivoting-crampon snowshoes.
Before people built snowshoes, nature provided examples. Several animals, most notably the snowshoe hare, had evolved over the years with oversized feet enabling them to move more quickly through deep snow.
The origin and age of snowshoes are not precisely known, although historians believe they were invented from 4,000 to 6,000 years ago, probably starting in Central Asia. British archaeologist Jacqui Wood hypothesized that the equipment interpreted to be the frame of a backpack of the Chalcolithic mummy Ötzi was actually part of a snowshoe. Strabo wrote that the inhabitants of the Caucasus used to attach flat surfaces of leather under their feet and that its inhabitants used round wooden surfaces, something akin to blocks, instead. However, the "traditional" webbed snowshoe as used today had direct origins to North American indigenous people, e.g., the Huron, Cree, and so forth. Samuel de Champlain wrote, referencing the Huron and Algonquin First Nations, in his travel memoirs (V.III, pg.
Official source
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