Outrigger Snowshoes

A lot of people will have no idea what I'm talking about here. Recently I made improvements to my outriggers, which I use for skiing, and so here is the explanation so other disabled skiers can get some ideas.

With outriggers, it's really tough to hike in deep powder, so backcountry skiing for me has basically been limited to what I can traverse to without hiking. A friend and I recently came up with a solution.

I use the very popular Superlite outriggers. I thought about starting from scratch and making new outriggers, but for now, I'm sticking with these. First of all, the ski on the bottom is too long for me. I cut off several inches from the tail-end of them.

If you look at the resulting cross-section of the back of the outrigger ski, it's T-shaped. Out of plastic (nylon?) which is basically the thickness and strength of a cutting board, we machined these:

The fit is tight--flawless.

Here you can see exactly where we cut the ski, notice the hole drilled in the rear of the ski:

And with the new basket attached:

To keep it in place, we put a steel .25" pin through the hole that was drilled.

These work surprisingly well. I've hiked in 8" or so of powder and they did great. I would have no problem with much deeper powder. I take these off to ski, and I keep them in the front pockets of my jacket. The pin gets really cold, and becomes really hard to pull out and put in. I might use something different to replace it.

The protruding ski out the bottom is helpful when hiking uphill, because it digs in really nicely to boot-packed holes or just hard snow. Fixed-ski outriggers are difficult when hiking uphill--you usually have to turn them 90 degrees to engage the edge (for grip) and it's really awkward for your arms.

This is simply what works for me at this point.