Winter

Beginners Guide: 3 Tips to Get Started Snowshoeing

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Winter is here and we LOVE it. It’s one of our favorite times to be outside. Yes, it’s colder. Yes, it gets darker faster. Yes, you have to wear a ton of layers. But there are so many fun activities you can do in winter that you can’t do any time of year. One of our favorite ones is snowshoeing! If you love to hike and are looking for a way to do so in winter, snowshoeing is the way to go for you! Read on for our top 3 tips to get you started snowshoeing!

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1. what do you wear?

This is the #1 question we get and it’s a great question. It can seem daunting to figure out how to stay warm and keep your feet dry. Our biggest tip - wear layers. You can always take some off if you get too warm (and yes, you can definitely get too warm even when it’s 20 degrees outside!).

I recommend wearing a warm base layer - running/active leggings and a tight fitting cold-gear top. Purchase some wool socks (we love the Smartwool brand) so your feet stay as warm as possible.

For your outer layer, if it is forecasted to be really cold or has snowed a ton the last few days, we wear snowpants over our leggings. On the top, we wear a coat that is built for cold activities, either a ski coat or a down coat. I personally love the Eddie Bauer light weight down coats - they have some that are rated to -20 degrees that are perfect for snowshoeing! If it hasn’t snowed or isn’t going to be too cold, I just go with leggings, no snowpants, and Steve goes for hiking pants. We still tend to wear a warmer coat.

Waterproof Boots. Besides having good layers, wearing waterproof boots is a MUST. Frozen toes are never fun. Wet, frozen toes are even worse. So find yourself some waterproof sturdy boots. I either wear Sorel snowboots that come up to about mid-calf, or I wear waterproof Merrel hiking boots that are made for winter (aka, they are lined on the inside to keep your feet extra toasty).

Sunglasses or ski goggles. If it’s sunny outside, you are going to want sunglasses. The sun reflecting on the snow makes for an extra bright day! We also will sub our sunglasses our for ski goggles. These wrap around our eyes more and block the glare off the snow in our peripheral vision which is really nice on a extra sunny day. If you want a cheaper pair of sunglasses to wear while being active outdoors that are polarized and don’t slip when you sweat, check these out.

A winter hat or ear warmers. There is not much worse than cold ears! Don’t forget to wear a hat or ear warmers to keep them warm. I know if I forget one, I’m signing myself up for a major ear ache the rest of the day.

Gloves. Keep those hands warm! If it’s going to be extra cold, it never hurts to throw some handwarmers in your gloves too.

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2. where do you get snowshoes? and what kind should i get?

You can purchase snowshoes at pretty much any outdoor gear store - REI, Christy Sports, Cabella’s, etc. You can also purchase them at Costco right around the holiday season, but once they are out, they don’t seem to get more shipments.

Brand wise, there are a few out there that are well known, and they have ranges of prices for their equipment. Tubbs, MSR, and Crescent all have great reviews and good ranges of prices for what you are looking for.

We purchased our first ones, beginner level, cheaper snowshoes on Amazon for ~$60 a pair, and honestly, they were an “off brand”. But they worked great for what we were wanting - a pair of snowshoes that we could learn with and not worry too much of beating them up or doing something wrong. Plus, we thought we would love snowshoeing, but if it had turned out we actually didn’t, we wouldn’t have been out a ton of money on gear. We have since purchased better ones from REI and are hoping they last us a long time since they were pricy!

If you are not sure you want to invest in your own snowshoes yet, you can rent them from REI! We love this as it will allow for you to give snowshoeing a try without too much investment.

3. how do i find a trail to snowshoe?

This is also a great question and we have learned the hard way that a “moderate” trail in summer is a LOT harder in snowshoes! Besides what to wear and what gear to get, this is the biggest thing to research so you can have the best experience.

We use the app AllTrails to find all our trails. To snowshoe, we recommend looking for a trail that is rated as “easy” - remember that snowshoeing is more difficult that standard hiking - with a distance in the 3-5 mile range.

Read the reviews on the app. A lot of users will put the conditions of the trail in their reviews and how they went about it. If there are no recent reviews, maybe add it to a list to look at again later if you like the look of it, and keep searching until you find one with more recent reviews so you know what to expect.

We hope you have a blast on the trails! If you have any specific questions, shoot us an email through our contact page, or leave it in the comments below!

Happy adventures!

Liz

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Burning Bear Snowshoe Trail

This past week has been hard for most Coloradoans, and honestly, most people across the US and world with what is happening with the Coronavirus, aka COVID-19. We’ve all been asked to “social distance” ourselves from others. Liz is a full blown extrovert, so being told to stay away from others is her absolute nightmare.

We have been trying to combat the cooped up feeling (see our blog post here about our favorite ways to not feel cooped-up) by getting outdoors as much as possible.

Yes, we are extremely fortunate that we live where we do but we challenge you to think about how you can get outdoors even if you live in a major city. Fresh air and sunshine? Sign us up.

This weekend we drove about an hour from where we live to check out Burning Bear Trail. We had never hiked or snowshoed this trail before, so we were really excited to see what it offered. Spoiler alert: it’s now our favorite snowshoe trail we’ve done. Yep. Favorite. Boom.

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I mean, who wouldn’t immediately fall in love with a trail when this is how it starts? Yes, it’s as wonderfully peaceful as it looks in the photo. The sound of water flowing under the bridge and not much else? Happy sigh.

Alltrails.com rates this trail as “easy”. Our rule of thumb is to add one level of difficulty to Alltrails’ ratings when going snowshoeing. You hike differently. Your stance is wider, your steps are different, and your legs burn from the effort of pulling yourself out of knee deep snow if you happen to find a soft spot.

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This trail is a 7.4 mile, out and back trail. There is a gradual incline on the way out, which means you get a really nice and easy hike coming back. The views were top notch. The parking situation was really easy, with a designated parking lot just around the corner from the trail head. All in, we loved this trail.

The best part for us? We are in the middle of a nation-wide ask to social distance and we ran into maybe a handful of people the entire time we were out. That’s about 20-30 people less than we were expecting. This is either one of the best kept trail secrets, or no one was wanting to drive an hour-ish from Denver to get there. Either way, we’ll take it.

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If you want a really relaxing, beautiful hike/snowshoe, we highly recommend this trail. It’s great for beginners and experienced snowshoes alike.

As always, be sure to do your trail research. Just because we loved this hike and had the most perfect day out there does not mean it’s perfect for you. Know your surroundings and what you are going to get into before you go.

Happy future trails!

- Team Be Outdoors

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Lost Lake Snowshoe Trail

Let’s start out by saying Alltrails rates this trail as “moderate”. What we soon found out is a “moderate” trail for hiking should be classified as “difficult” for snowshoe season. This trail is straight up. And up some more. And then up again.

But once you get to the top? Totally worth the fact that our hip flexors are going to be screaming at us for the next couple days.

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This is not a trail we would recommend for beginner snowshoers. If you have any sort of knee injury that does not allow for you to go up or down hills easily, we’d recommend you avoid this one. Overall, the elevation gain is just shy of 1,000 feet, which isn’t bad when just hiking, but add a heavy layer of snow and it’s definitely a lot harder than it reads on paper.

You have to park at the Hessie Trailhead. There are no facilities and no parking spots other than side of the road parking. If you are the first one there, you will know you’ve arrived when the road dead-ends.

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The hike is beautiful. You will cross over two bridges that, in winter, are heavily snowpacked. Having gone in the middle of March, the snow was starting to melt and we could hear the river running below us, but could not yet see the water as it was still under a heavily layer of ice and snow.

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The last push to get to the lake is extremely steep. We ran into a couple people heading back down when we were almost to the top. They gave us the motivation to push through the steep incline and also gave us a pro tip that the view is best from the middle of the lake and to turn around to look back on what we just hiked up. They were right. The view was stunning. And totally worth the sore calf muscles and hip flexors the next day.

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