A Journey Inside the Heartland of Snowshoeing
A wander into the Maine backwoods leads to the spiritual roots of the great winter sport.
Each winter, tens of thousands of skiers ride a chairlift three-quarters of the way up southern Maine’s highest mountain.
These poor people. They have no idea they’re doing it wrong. A long, wooded whaleback in the foothills of the White Mountains, less than 10 miles from the New Hampshire border, Pleasant Mountain and its surrounds are meant to be explored on snowshoes.
Maine Coast
Small town travel tips, interviews with poets, oyster farmers, and fishing guides; boatbuilding craft intel and literary history.
As a pursuit, this may lack skiing’s glamour. But as generations of rural New Englanders can attest, the humble snowshoe gets you where you want to go, across all manner of winter-bound terrain. This time-honored transport unlocks the vistas of the backcountry, like Mount Pleasant’s 2,006-foot summit, a couple of miles south along a snaking ridgeline from where the ski lifts top out.
The last time I went up, my son was tucked into a chest carrier, zipped up in my coat. The little guy secured, my wife and I set out along the Southwest Ridge Trail, on the mountain’s “back” side, miles from the ski runs, the longest and most exposed of four footpaths that converge at the summit like a shakily scribbled X. In the summertime? Forget it. You can’t get a parking spot at the trailhead. But setting out on a bluebird day in January, snowshoes crunching into a patina of New England crust atop a foot of snow, our only company was a bald eagle flying lazy circles overhead.
Snowshoeing in this corner of Maine is a pilgrimage of sorts, as Pleasant Mountain sits at the historical epicenter of recreational snowshoeing in the U.S. Of course, Indigenous folks in northern regions crafted snowshoes long before anyone strapped a pair on just for fun. Designs varied widely by region, but the long, racket-like ones preferred by Wabanaki peoples in what’s now Maine and eastern Canada are likely what you picture when you envision “old-school wooden snowshoes.”
And those were the sort beloved by les raquetteurs, a breed of winter-sports-crazy Franco Americans who immigrated from Quebec—where snowshoe racing was big—to work in Maine’s mill towns in the 19th century. Les raquetteurs formed America’s first snowshoe clubs. (Nearby Lewiston, as just one example, boasted a huge roster of clubs by the 1950s, with zesty French-language names like Les Diables Rouge [“Red Devils”] and Les Hiboux Blancs [“White Owls”].) These sporting pioneers took to “tramping,” as they called it, all throughout the western Maine foothills, a crinkled landscape of glacial lakes, aspen-strewn river valleys and postcard mountain towns linked by miles of wooded trails.
Just north of Pleasant Mountain, the town of Norway once billed itself as the Snowshoe Capital of America, birthplace of now-gargantuan (and Seattle-based) Tubbs Snowshoes. The town’s Western Foothills Land Trust still throws a snowshoe fest there each February at the Roberts Farm Preserve, with races, snowshoe tugs-of-war and group outings on a ridge overlooking the ice shanties on Pennesseewassee Lake. In nearby Oxford, Route 26 Antiques shows off highlights from a collection of more than 200 pairs of handmade snowshoes (along with cool vintage runner sleds). Down the road, you can rent a contemporary pair at Oxbow Beer Garden, then head out on the brewery’s five miles of trails. (Saisons await in the warming hut.)
Catching the spirit of this legacy but modernizing it, I wore a pair of aluminum-framed Tubbs up Pleasant Mountain, the crampons biting into the hardpack, the baby snoozing against my chest. Here, we stopped to admire some bobcat tracks; there, to look out from some ledges. At the rocky summit: unmatched solitude, a lonely sentinel of a decommissioned fire tower and a New England winter tableau more or less identical to what les raquetteurs would have enjoyed.
We took a few selfies with hoary-headed Mount Washington, the Northeast’s highest peak, looming on the horizon. Then we tightened our straps and started tramping our way down.
