US Mil Surplus Magnesium Snowshoe review

This is more of a mini review… in a couple of weeks I will get a full review done and get a couple of pics up. For now here is a quick write up and video

I have very little snowshoeing experience. We picked up a set of tubbs snowshoes this year for the cabin but I only used them a couple of times. They worked well but were expensive.

A friend of mine found these and we both decided to get a set. The video is my first time out with them.

So far I really like them… the binding system is easy and works pretty well… it seems that the front toe binding works better with wider boots as I did have mine come off once… I have a couple of ideas on how to make sure that does not happen again…

The white painted finish did have some chips in them but being a mil surplus item that is to be expected… overall I would say they were in very good condition…

When researching these I found some of the sites people complained about the bindings being hard to setup and use. There seem to be two different systems out there on these. One uses the original 30 year old bindings and the strapping is starting to show it’s age. The ones we got from the sportsman guide were simple and appear to be well made.

I went ahead to took the web pages I found on setting these up and created a PDF : US Military Issue Snow Shoes. Maybe this will help some people with the bindings.

The snow was very powdery and probably around 10 inches on the ground. I will do a followup in a couple of weeks if we get some deep snow as I would like to see how they work with 2-3 feet on the ground and with a heavier snow.

With the very powdery snow I was sinking in 4-6 inches. The traction was good and I felt stable at all times.

My friend in the video did also run into one thing. When he setup his bindings he had his foot to far forward and it took a while for him to figure out what was wrong. He felt some drag on the one side but could not pinpoint what it was. After looking at it we figured it out. I had ran into something similar with the pair of tubbs we have so this is not isolated to this snow show and is more related to setup.

As of right now I will be buying a couple of other sets for the cabin and leaving them down their. At this price it’s cheap enough and will give people another activity to do if we go down in the winter.

2 thoughts on “US Mil Surplus Magnesium Snowshoe review”

  1. Thank you thank you thank you for putting that pdf together! I just got a set of these which came with new bindings, uninstalled, and an instruction sheet that was not any better than no instruction sheet at all. With your pdf I got the bindings installed correctly on the first try. I’ve been joking that since I bought these it will guarantee that we’ll have no more snow this winter, but I’m really hoping for some snow soon so I can try these out.

    Thanks again!

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