This invention is concerned with snowshoes and in particular with snowshoes adaptable to receive ice crampon in a manner enabling quick and easy conversion from snowshoeing to traversing ice without snowshoes.
Snowshoes in recent years have evolved from the conventional wood frames with rawhide netting serving as a deck, to metal or plastic composite frames with decks of Hypalon or other high strength material, usually wrapped around the frame and riveted. Modern snowshoes usually include cleats for engaging snow or ice, at the toe harness and often at a location under the heel of the boot as well.
In climbing or steep terrain hiking in snowy and icy conditions, the climber often needs to switch from wearing snowshoes on the boots to crampons on the boots, and back to snowshoes as fields of deeper snow are again encountered. To change from ice crampons to snowshoes, the user normally has to release the crampon's bales from front and back of the boot, remove the crampons and stow them in or on a pack, take out a pair of snowshoes from the pack, with their relatively heavy toe harness assemblies and cleats, and secure the snowshoes to the boots using several harness straps. In conditions where deep snow and ice are alternately encountered, the hiker or climber would be much better served if the crampon teeth could serve as the cleats for the snowshoes, and this is a primary object of the invention.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,620,375 disclosed a snowshoe wherein the user's boot was secured to a binding on an ice crampon. The crampon had toe and heel cleats which passed down through openings in toe and heel areas of the snowshoe deck when the user's boot was pivoted to the heel-down position, so that the crampon cleats served as cleats for the snowshoe. A horizontal pivot pin had to be assembled through the snowshoe frame and the crampon binding.
Atlas Snowshoe Company U.S. Pat. No. 5,440,827 described one form of snowshoe/boot combination in which a heel cleat was fixed to the boot heel rather than to the snowshoe deck, which instead had an opening through which the boot heel extended when weight was placed on the heel.