shoe shopping

last moth i wore out two pairs of hiking boots. for each pair the wearing came over a period of years. after three or four years of hard use, the first pair ceased to be waterproof, but were otherwise good for light travel on dry days, so i kept them. after four or five years the NEW pair's soles simply fell off.

this happened the same week that the old pair's soles wore through.

so i had to go shoe shopping. while there are lots of hiking boots out there to buy, there are a very limited number of stiff-soled fully waterproof hikers that you can wear year-round.

and by "year-round", i mean that i will be wearing them for summer hiking, but i will also need to wear them with crampons in winter.

so i tried on all three of the boots that qualified, and it turns out that only one of them fits me.

this isn'
t really a surprise, because it's simply the same boot i've been wearing all these years.