Let It Snow!

In the natural wonderland of northern Vermont, a snowshoe novice finds a whole new reason to love winter in New England.

- Adam Leith Gollner

You have to strut!” my girlfriend, Michelle, hollered at me from the bottom of the hill, pointing at her hips and waving her ski poles around. How had she gotten down there so quickly? We were deep in Vermont’s snowbound woods, on a mountain at Mad River Glen. Everything was white and icy, all slumbering trees and prehistoric boulders. The only sound consisted of a rusty leaf rattling between two branches—and our voices echoing through the frosty air.

“Strut?” I yelled back, still trying to get the hang of going downhill on the tech-y, lightweight aluminum snowshoes we’d rented. “Like a model on a catwalk,” she said, shimmying encouragingly. Easy for her to say, radiating glamour in her Jackie O. sunglasses. The only way I could figure out how to descend the hillside was to let the tail end of the frame touch down first, then slide forward until the crampons—the fanged grip on the snowshoes’ bottom—kicked in and provided some traction. This lurching method meant I had to lean back while executing high, wide knee lifts, resulting in a form that wasn’t so much Gigi Hadid as Robert Crumb’s Keep on Truckin’ character—wearing snow pants.

Natural though I wasn’t, I still loved my first grown-up snowshoeing hike. As soon as we set off on the Mad River Glen trail, we were immediately ensconced in the Vermont wilderness. To snowshoe is to experience the landscape from within in a way you never can when you’re zooming down groomed slopes, or even bushwhacking off-trail. A snowshoer is simply one with the elements, tramping through the frozen countryside in a state of calm exhilaration.