Often, when people plan for contingencies, they make the mistake of focusing on the worst-case scenarios — the scariest thing that might happen — rather than the most likely things to go wrong. Just such a thing happened to me this week.
I have had one pair of Vasque hiking boots for about nine years. They are well-worn and not at all worn out. They fit great and I have hiked many miles in them. They have good non-skid soles.
And yet for years now I have been bothered by their main drawback: They are not waterproof. They have partial mesh uppers, and the gusset leaks like a sieve. Because the soles are good and thick, I'm good for two inches of water, but any puddles deeper than that or a little rain, and I've got wet feet.
Admittedly I rarely deliberately hike in rain or deep mud. It has happened accidentally on occasion. And one thing about wet feet is, most of the time it's merely an annoyance, but occasionally it can be really dangerous to soak your socks. If the temperatures fall below freezing, for example. So for nine years, as I've pulled on my comfy, well-worn hikers at trailheads in Hawaii and Utah and Minnesota and Ohio and Wisconsin, I've had this bothersome little thought about how I really need to get some waterproof boots. I kept putting it off though, mostly because I wouldn't think about it much until I was already at the trailhead.
But for some reason as we were preparing for our family vacation to the Rockies this year, when Mark asked me if there was any new gear I needed, I remembered: I've been meaning to get some waterproof boots! And lo, the credit card was produced, and the order was placed with the fantastic Sierra Trading Post online store, and the new boots arrived. I put them on and walked around town. They were comfortable. They were so lightweight! And they were waterproof.
***
Here is where the failure to calculate properly set in.
In nine years of wearing them, I had become very used to thinking of the woefully inadequate dryness of my breathable mesh hikers. Seduced by the promise of _solving this problem,_ I failed to sit down and think clearly about the following vital question:
Which is more likely —
(a) that I will find myself standing in three inches of water while trail hiking, in weather conditions under which wet feet create a serious hazard, while on a non-backcountry trip to the eastern Rocky Mountains of Colorado in mid-August, or
(b) that new boots will give me blisters?
Reader, I didn't even bring the old boots with me to Colorado.
Fortunately, I did bring my running shoes, which are even less waterproof than my hiking boots and of course have no ankle support, but which are cross-trainers with a decently grippy sole. So I had alternative footwear which proved adequate for more hikes, at least after Mark and I had buried my four (yes, FOUR) nasty blisters in moleskin and band-aids and sealed them to my skin with duct tape, in a sort of hybrid of the advice we found on the Internet and the advice we got from the nice nurse at the first aid station.
This story has a happy ending. With the moleskin and duct tape, and thick socks, and my running shoes, Mark and I hiked more than eight miles today on a nearly deserted loop trail — a memorable hike through various stages of the post-burn forest succession, with wonderfully varied terrain. We climbed 1,450 feet at the beginning and made our way back down along a long gentle slope, only getting confused and having to argue about the topo map once. And when I peeled off the tape at the end of the day, the blisters were still there and they didn't look any worse than before, which is about as good as you can ask for an eight-mile mountain hike.
The story has a thoughtful ending as well. I'm not saying it was a bad idea to buy a new pair of hiking boots. Someday it may happen that when it really matters, I have dry socks instead of wet ones. (Assuming I get them properly broken in at some point.)
But what have we learned here? I think, that it's important to identify what the problem is before you try to solve it. And to recognize that "good enough" is relative. I had gotten so used to thinking of my old boots as "not good enough" that I failed to realize they were, in fact, exactly the tool for the job. And having left them behind in favor of the shiny new "good" thing that wasn't actually adequate, I had to use shoes that just last week I would have called dangerously inadequate. And discovered that they worked, well, pretty much just fine. I had to take extra care crossing water and I felt the lack of ankle support here and there, but the proof is in my non-sprained ankles. In a pinch, or a chafe anyway, sturdy-soled running shoes work.
Lesson learned.
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