What is Your Preferred Snowshoe?

Originally Posted By: BucksnboldersIt depends on snow conditions. I have four different pair. The Tubbs and Sherpa's are great shoes, But in deep powder, Nothing works as well as the long { ? 48" X 10" } wood and rawhide shoes with the long tail. The long tail helps pull the nose of the shoe up and you don't have to lift your feet as high. The long tail also assists you a lot in thicker vegetation because it trails behind you better. For short walks to coyote hunting stands I would stay with the Tabb's or Sherpa's, But for long days on a pair of snow shoe's nothing compares to the longer rawhide covered wood shoe's. When using wood & rawhide shoe's, make sure they have a thick later of varathane to keep them from absorbing water and to keep the snow from sticking.
As I was reading down the thread, this was pretty much what I was going to say.
I also have 4 pair, two of the older wood and rawhide and two pair of the newer aluminum ones.
If you want the best of both worlds, you may want to look at the military ones that someone already mentioned.
They will have the surface area of the older style and the material of the newer style.
Just a thought.
 
I have a pair of Atlas and a pair of MSR (the plastic older model). They may not look like much, bit I like the MSR the best. They're light weight and have good traction. The bindings are simple and secure. I can add tails to the backs for added support if needed. They are best suited for the more powdery snow as they tend to collect a lot more wet snow. If I'm going to be in wet snow, I will use the Atlas. They don't pick up as much snow as the MSR, but they don't have as much traction as MSR the either. But I discovered yesterday, ANYTHING is better than nothing.

I also tried something else yesterday that I wanted to pass along. Some of my walking to stands is on snow packed roads where the snow has been driven on, thawed, re-frozen and then snowed on again. So yesterday I strapped on a pair of Yaktrax. They worked great on packed, un-even snow and ice. They're light weight and easy to slip on over shoes. I even wore them in the deeper snow just to keep from slipping in that. If you do that, you will want to tie (I used 1/4"x 12" bungee) them to your feet to keep from losing them. (Yaktrax.com)
 
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