These light weight field boots fit my feet very well, and hold up very well, too.
Got them a half size smaller than my regular shoes, and fit allows for both single boot socks when it's hot, and the addition of a Kirkland wool outer sock when it's cold.
Wow, I learned something new - get your boots smaller than your regular shoes so you can wear heavy socks in cold weather. And here I always bought mine a 1/2 size larger...
lol
I'm becoming a bigger fan of zero drop shoes like altras. , prefer over Solomons. that's mostly in drier conditions staying on trails. They have helped ankle calf strength
How are they on hip/knee/ankle joint stress, especial w/ a pack?
Nice thing about the light weight polyurethane-soled field boot is the shock-absorbing heel.
GR
The consensus among the power-user set is that the modern era of zero-drop light hikers are in general far and away superior to traditional “boots” when it comes to minimizing hip/knee/ankle joint stress. You want to find out if a shoe works- wear them hiking
every single day for 5-6 months for ~20 miles/day with a backpack. That’ll bring out the problems, if there are any.
I’d say there’s two groups of folks who will be good canaries in the coal mine as far as their bodies providing this type of feedback. Forget what the healthy 20-something’s are doing (more below); they can get away with things the following two groups cannot. The groups are a) power users, like through-hikers on one of the main trails, and b) older hikers such as myself (late 50’s) on up. Older bodies are less resilient and tend to have accumulated injuries. There are plenty of folks who are both- I was, for 6 weeks this spring. My wife is this very minute. In NM, we met a number of folks roughly our age on the CDT. Cyn has reconnected with several of the trail. One- retired military and cop. Another, recently retired JAG. Another- a woman older than us from Bend. Another- a guy from France who barely speaks English. Another- a forester taking a work hiatus. And so on. Point being there’s plenty of late 50’s/early 60’s folks in both the power-user AND aging-body category.
The power-user consensus’s couldn’t be more clear. They are to a man wearing one of the zero drop light hikers in low-top. I think I mentioned one guy- younger, actually- with a congenitally weak ankle. He was still wearing them, with an ankle brace. On the CDT, the older bodies were also wearing them. I was a rare exception in my Solomons. I could be faulted for rigid thinking for that, but as I’ve said, they really work for me and I knew this based on, jeez, probably around 1k miles hiked in them prior to this last trip.
What I hope is that this knowledge will filter out to the “old bodies” crowd writ large. There’s obviously a lot of resistance. I predict that when the folks who are young NOW, become old someday, their legs will be in better shape than us geezers are because they won’t have spent decades suffering in janky boots.
As to the 20-somethings. My wife just crossed paths with the young woman I mentioned earlier, who we hiked with one day, the one who did who knows how many miles that day- at least 27- and was still trucking as she left us in her wake. Her trail name is Huck, and she’s pure badass. You’d never in a million years know it from looking at her. Anyway Cyn is now southbound, but Huck kept going northbound, and they just crossed paths in Wyoming. Huck is on the leading edge of ALL northbound CDT hikers at this moment. She’s amazing. She’s 24. The little shït is wearing SANDALS.
