Last Sunday in the Ottawa Citizen we saw helpful instructions on how to walk; in snowshoes that is. And how to choose snowshoes too.
The NCC website doesn’t have trail reports for snowshoeing the way it does for cross country skiing, but GuideGatineau offers snowshoe trail reports. Take a look in the rightmost column. If you care to contribute after your next outing just let me know.
One thing that Dave Brown didn’t say in his Citizen article was that as the sport of snowshoeing grows so does the potential for conflict with other winter trail users and that a little bit of etiquette on all sides can easily avoid this.
Problems are unusual but when they do occur it is often the result of snowshoers or skiers using each other’s trails and “ruining them.” Gatineau Park has designated trails for each winter sport and although the numbers of kilometers of trail for skiers outnumbers the total distance for snowshoe enthusiasts, when measured in terms of the numbers of each type of user, at this point, snowshoeing has more kilometer per user (200,000 ski trips per year vs. 50,000 snowshoe trips according to the last NCC stats I saw – with 200km claimed for skiers and 60km for snowshoeing).
When one adds in the fact that skiers generally move more rapidly over the snow than raquetteers this should mean that both groups are well supplied with wilderness routes and that one group using another’s trail should be unnecessary.
If you do see someone out on the wrong trail based on the hardware on their feet, you might politely remind them of this simple rule of trail use etiquette, but if they get shirty about it, don’t make an issue of it; let someone at the NCC handle that (of course they can’t handle it unless they hear about it; here’s there contact info).
The cards that GuideGatineau has begun distributing to promote the website are considered to be highly environmentally responsible due to the fact that the paper used is 100% recycled and is produced using energy from biofuels plus the ink is vegetable based.