Uncle Arnie’s Snow Shoes
$200
(Sold)*
These wooden snowshoes, once owned by my uncle Dr. Arnie Towe, a former professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Washington, are significant examples of traditional snowshoe design. Snowshoes have been used for thousands of years across northern latitudes, originally developed by Indigenous peoples and early inhabitants to traverse deep winter snow. Crafted from bent hardwood frames and rawhide webbing, early designs varied by region, with long, narrow snowshoes for deep forest travel in the North and wide, rounded Bear Paw or Huron styles for flatter terrain in North America, alongside simpler European designs suited to alpine and Nordic conditions. European settlers adopted and refined North American styles, and by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, wooden snowshoes were commercially manufactured with laminated wood and leather bindings. While eventually supplanted by modern materials, these snowshoes remain a tangible link to the ingenuity and practicality of their makers.