Skiing: Nanook of the North walks again

The technique is simple: walk on flattish snow in shoes that are 10 times too big for you. Stephen Wood discovers the arcane art of snowshoeing.

Good news: El Nino is coming. True, this weather system - which starts as a warm patch in the Pacific Ocean and ends up, in a bad year, disturbing climate patterns in much of the southern hemisphere - is not welcome everywhere: farmers in a drought area expected to span South Africa, Indonesia and Australia do not, for example, have cause for celebration.

But among snowshoe manufacturers and suppliers in the US, it's a different story. They've already had a good decade. Snowshoes have been around for a long time (they are said to have permitted the original colonisation of north America, via the Bering Strait), but their image didn't develop much for 8,000 years; the snowshoe remained "Nanook of the North" footwear until somebody had the bright idea of adapting it for wilderness jogging in winter. Then, from the late Eighties, snowshoeing took off, to became the fastest growing winter sport in the US.

In place of the old wood-and-gut tennis rackets strapped on to fur boots, the new snowshoes are high-tech devices of titanium and man-made polymers, with a binding to grip on to soft boots or shoes - or Nike's new "Air Spindrift" trainer, specifically for snowshoeing. They are worn by competitors in "Mountain Man" triathlons (which combine skiing, skating and snowshoeing), by snowmobilers (you need snowshoes, apparently, to right a capsized snowmobile), and by families who go trekking in the backwoods. All that adds up to 650,000 people altogether, according to US figures for the 1995/6 season.

Now, on top of all that and a doubling of the number of US snowshoe stockists (to more than 1,000) this season "the gods are blessing us with El Nino," says Lyn Cariffe, a vice-president of Redfeather Design, one of the leading US manufacturers. The weather system is expected to produce a bumper snowfall in the western states. If just slipping out for a beer involves slipping on a pair of snowshoes, imagine what that will do for Redfeather's sales.

A modern snowshoe typically consists of an aluminium frame, wide at the front and tapering to the back, with a rubber-like material stretched across it to form a "flotation deck". Think of a pair of stiletto heels: snowshoes are the opposite, and not just in sex appeal. They spread your body weight over a large area so that you can "float" on the snow. (The size of shoe you wear depends on your weight; but an average pair is 2ft long and 9in wide.)

You strap your boots into a binding that pivots under the ball of the foot - and then, according to Redfeather's publicity, you just start snowshoeing: "The only difference between a beginner and an expert," it says, "is the first six steps".

This is a slight exaggeration. I tried a pair of Redfeather snowshoes in Austria in the spring, and after two hours it was still obvious that I was a beginner. But it was an exhilarating two hours.

The technique is simple: on flattish snow you just walk, with the handicap of shoes which are 10 times too big and keep getting in each other's way. Going uphill, the shoes lie flat against the slope but the bindings pivot - and vicious talons beneath your toes pass through holes in the flotation deck to bite into the snow for grip. Here the effort of pushing yourself up a steep slope can force the shoe through the crust and deep down into the snow; and getting a leg back up to the surface when there's a snowshoe attached to the end is not easy. What the beginner does - I speak from personal experiences, several of them - is to twist his boot out of the rubber binding, to face the bigger problem of putting a shoe back on while flailing around in a snowdrift.

The pleasures are even more simple than the technique. Mainly, they are physical: snowshoeing up a slope sets the heart pumping and the chest heaving, and 15 minutes up my first climb I was already stripped to the waist. The feeling of sweating profusely into the cold mountain air on a bright April morning was absolutely sensational. Think of working out in a dank, sweaty gym; then think of doing the same thing half-way up a mountain. It's a better thought, isn't it? On top of that, there is the the thrill of just trekking off into the mountain scenery, with crowds of skiers behind you and the virgin snow in front.

Are these pleasures enough to turn British skiers on to snowshoeing? Probably not, because we are fixated on downhill thrills. Gordon Fraser, managing director of Mountain Sports, admits that his company chose to import Redfeather snowshoes this year only because a requirement of new EU mountain-leader qualifications is competence in snowshoeing. "At the moment, the market for snowshoes is pretty much non-existent, although there may be a few people buying them through mail order from the US," Fraser says. Apart from mountain leaders, he hopes that "snowboarders who want to access back-woods areas may buy them: for them, we are selling a wider binding to fit soft snowboarding boots. And there may be a market for families, too."

Since snowshoeing is so easy, and doesn't have the fear factor of downhill skiing, it is an ideal winter sport for families, says Fraser - "for children who are learning to ski, for wives who don't like skiing, for husbands who want a work-out in the evenings". But snowshoes cost about pounds 150 a pair; and compared with the 1,000-odd shops selling them in the US, Mountain Sports is supplying fewer than two dozen (including the Boardwise and Snow+Rock chains) in the UK.

Fraser wouldn't put a figure on how may pairs he expects to sell this season, "but believe me, it's very small. I'd like to see other manufacturers coming in; and I'd like to see some race events, especially in Scotland. But no one is going to get rich selling snowshoes here, simply because we don't have snow on the ground for weeks on end."

And, unfortunately, not even El Nino can help with that. Weather forecasters predict that it will have an effect in the UK: tea, coffee and sugar prices are expected to go up. But no more snow than usual is expected to come down.