Grab Your Snowshoes!

For this blog post, I was inspired by the change in weather at Colgate.
As we all know, winter brings a new kind of struggle to Colgate- walking up the icy hill to your 8:20
without falling. In this blog post, I will discuss some popular and unpopular (yet efficient!) ways
of making it to class without slipping. 

If you are like me and you forgot your snow boots at home, you know the struggles of walking up the
hill in wet tennis shoes. However, I decided to look at the physics behind the dilemma that I am facing…

Tennis shoes often have soles with poor grips on them, which means that they have poor traction. Traction is essentially the friction between two surfaces. Having poor traction on the bottom of your shoes increases your chances of slipping. 

  In addition, the surface area of tennis shoes is only slightly wider than the size of your foot. Because
your weight is distributed over a small surface area, you are more likely to sink in the snow... leading to
cold and wet feet.

If you are among the majority of Colgate students, than you probably have given in and bought a pair
of bean boots...

Bean boots claim that the pattern of the grip on the bottom of their shoes is designed to push liquids away from the bottom of the shoe, resulting in more shoe to ground contact. Increased shoe to ground contact, means increased traction. In addition the grips on the bottom of the shoes provide more traction with the ground. The increased number of ridges on the bottom of your shoes result in more friction between the ground and your shoes. 

In addition, bean boots are slightly wider than your everyday tennis shoes, meaning that your
weight is distributed over a slightly wider surface area. Because your weight is distributed over a
greater surface area, your pressure on the snow beneath you decreases slightly. Therefore, you are
slightly less likely to sink in the snow beneath you. 

An unpopular method to make it up “the hill” at colgate is snowshoes… 

However, this method provides you with more grips and a larger surface area. You will have greater
traction AND you are much much less likely to sink into the snow.

In conclusion….