Bush Work On Snowshoes

    Yesterday I blogged about those first snowshoes we bought.  They were wide, handmade, and constructed of wood and leather.  I have always thought that those old style snowshoes, with their bent wood and cross-checked webbing of leather had a real rustic beauty to them.  Those first snowshoes we only used for recreation in the snow.

    In the early 1980’s I began working for the BC Forest Service, and during the winter, if we were doing work in the bush, we had to use snowshoes.  Those snowshoes were also handmade in the old style, but were narrower and longer than the ones we had at home.  They were made by the Chestnut Canoe  Company in New Brunswick.  Because they were narrower, walking in them was more normal, because you didn’t have to keep your feet so far apart, but their length did make it awkwardly difficult to stand in one place and turn around.

    We would often have to be on snowshoes all day, as we would shush our way through the the deep snow to do our work.  We would usually drive as close as we could to where we were doing surveys, looking for Bark Beetles, of checking timber cruises.  Once we got to as far as we could drive in the 4-wheel drive pickups, if we needed to go further into the bush, we would have to snowshoe, or later use snowmobiles.  Then, as we did our work we wore snowshoes around in the forested mountain slopes.

    Sometimes if we had to work in a very isolated area, we were helicoptered in and dropped off at some place where the chopper could land, then we had to snowshoe to the area we had to work in.   Winter days are short, so we always work quickly and give ourselves enough time to snowshoe back to the arranged spot where the helicopter was supposed to pick us up.  We always kept our fingers crossed hoping that the weather didn’t turn bad and leave us stranded overnight. 

    The one time it looked like that was going to happen, the helicopter couldn’t get in at the arranged time because of the weather, so we had already started to build ourselves a fire for overnighting, when the helicopter found a break in the storm and did manage to finally make it through and picked us up.

    Tomorrow I will blog about another of those snowshoe days, when something did go a bit awry.

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