I have here snowshoes , a pair ofd little ones and a pair of adult sized, made for my family by a North Country guide in gratitude for some legal counciling my father had given him…some eighty or ninety or a hundred years ago. Snowshoes are generally made, or best made, of Black Ash which grows in wet conditions and is friendly to the radical bending needed to make the frames, and is not used green when it is still flexible, but is first air-dried and then soaked for a good long time to make it flexible again. My friend Bob Neudorfer and I, back in the previous century, attempted to make a pair, starting with kiln dried commercial ash. First we steamed and soaked the ash….as well as we could with the avbailable eighty gallon steel barrels, and then we bent the pieces around a form, breaking one potential snowshoe before it was made. I don’t know what became of the sucessfully bent one…but who wants ONE snowshoe? Bob Neudorfer, however, learned the lesson and went on to manufacture snowshoes and bentwood furniture for the Vermont Tubs company. I never got any further with snowshoes myself, prefering skis made by professionals, but my virtual brother William independently made a unique pair snowshoes, inspired by his own special needs and abilities. And wow, he could fly on those things! Maybe you already know that William himself is unique in that he has exteremely short legs in relation to his body size. He was more at home in the trees than on the ground as a kid, and he liked to ride dogs. I have never seen a dog so big and tough that William couldn’t dog- talk it into carrying him….I guess it helped that he stood eye with most riding-size dogs. Then he discovered sheet- rocking stilts and they changed his life. First of all they made him tall as…as me anyway, and the stilts which strap on to the lower leg and are meant to make it feasable for a sheet-rock worker to tape and spackle a normal seven foot four inch ceiling without a ladder. And the stilts are are spring-loaded to prevent one from thumping around and that add a bit of lift, like with the newer, high-tech running shoes. The stilts didn’t bring William up to sheet-rocking heights, but he didn’t have to go through the check-out line riding in the grocery cart inorder to be seen, and he discovered, once he (very quickly) mastered the stilts, that he could actually run now, and that the springs were a definite boost. He customized his springs, upsizing them, and it was quite a sight to see him bounding in three foot high arcs through the hayfield out back. He always used his own shoes on the stilt feet and wore long enough pants that he looked more or less normal except for his impressive long stride. He is good that way on hard ground, but a foot or more of snow is a problem, and dealing with skis is not something he could maged. But he made himself a pair of snowshoes, using grapevine instead of ash and, as you can plainly see, he stuck it full of feathers….mostly primary wing feathers from a turkeys. Over deep drifted snow with a good sprigy crust, he can cross that meadow out back like some kind of bird you never heard of.