Businessweek has a quick guide to snowshoeing with enough expensive name brands to drive the GoBlog guys up a wall (which is what they like to do, as long as ropes are involved). This sentence struck me:

Atlas’ spring-loaded snowshoes ($249 and up) let your feet move from side to side while keeping your heels in place. Weighing about four pounds per pair, they don’t feel like heavy saucers as you climb uphill.

I’m sorry, but four pounds of anything on your feet is going to be really, really heavy. The adage is that a pound on the foot is like 40 on the shoulders — so add two pounds for waterproof boots to that four pounds and you’re talkin’ serious sloggin.

Another annoyance:

Studies show that snowshoeing burns 420 to 1,000 calories per hour, so you’ll shed pounds, too.

Any exercise that burns a thousand calories in an hour is apt to induce cardiac arrest in about 90 percent of the population. That isn’t a toss-off-the-pounds workout, it’s a do-this-only-if-you’re-a-marathoner workout.

I suppose snowshoeing is no big deal so long as the trails are beaten down enough that you, uh, don’t precisely need snowshoes. If, however, you picture yourself truckin’ across waist-deep open powder with six pounds strapped to your tootsies, you’d better be in good condition. Then again, if you do it often enough, you’ll get in good condition. I can think of about 600 more sensible ways to get in shape, none of which involve alpine environments that include snow, sleet, high winds and the general condition of freezing one’s fanny off, but the world is run rampant with sensible things to do, too. I’ll wait for one my intrepid readers to try it and report back.