hestetruger

[Dan Buczala]

This may sound a bit off the wall, but the deep snow here in New England, and the thread on logging in deep snow got me thinking about this again…

A while ago I was talking with a friend who grew up in Norway. When he was growing up, work horses were still common, and he mentioned that in the winter horses were fitted with what is called hestetruger – horse snowshoes. That piqued my curiosity, so I did a little searching on line.

Apparently, hestetruger have been used in Sweden for at least 700 years, and are still used by Norwegian soldiers patrolling the Arctic today (http://www.lrgaf.org/articles/snowshoes.pdf). This link also speculates that if Scott had used the hestetruger that he had brought to the Antarctic with him, instead of leaving them behind in his base camp, he may not only have survived, but may have even beaten Amundsen to the South Pole.

This link is to an article in the New York Times (published in 1874) reporting that a stagecoach company in California had started using them with their horses: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F50B1FFC3C5F1A7493C0A8178AD85F408784F9. These were fitted with “a sharp toe and heels or corks”.

And this link shows some pictures of them being used with pack horses in Stewart BC: http://www.horseshoemuseum.com/SnowShoe.htm

So I’m curious, is anyone currently using horse snowshoes?

[lancek]

Im not but very interesting concept!

[mitchmaine]

hi dan, farm museums and old barns here in maine have what they called “bog shoes”.
they were used for cutting marsh hay off the saltmarshes down on the coast. kept the horses from punching through the thin root system into the mud. they look just like your snowshoes. never heard of snowshoes, even though we have alot more snow than salt bogs. wonder if the historians got it right?
they said it took a certain knack the horse had to develop to move freely without clipping themselves.

[near horse]

There was an episode on Rural Heritage that showed pack mules in the Sierra Mtns of N. California, hauling the mail with snowshoes on. Even showed a guy putting ’em on a mule that laid over on its side while he attached them. Getting up must be the tricky part!

Amazing what those beasts will tolerate from us.

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