UKH

Invested in a set of TSL 325 snowshoes - after research. Since mid December 2017 some Scottish hills have had huge snow dumps and walking has been tortuous when the snow was often deep, drifted and unconsolidated! The shoes have been a pleasure to wear over mixed ground including huge snowfields and ridges of and I stress, 'post holing' type snow. However, they have proved worse than useless on fresh unconsolidated deep snow. Sinking mainly into thigh depth on Beinn nan Imirean on Thursday, I at one point plunged in up to shoulder depth at a burn bed which was completely disguised as a flat snowfield. Getting out of the hole with snowshoes on was not achieved elegantly! They were functionally enjoyable to use on top half of hill - deep but partly consolidated stuff. Have I wasted my money as I purchased them for the deep soft stuff - often shown in the persuasive promotional videos?

Some MSR models take a ´ floatation tail´ for conditions like you describe, you add it to the snowshoe to give a greater surface area to stop you sinking in to really deep snow. They are expensive snowshoes, and a bit late if you've already invested in the TSL ones.

And some of it is about being able to recognise the the kind of snow you won't/will sink into!!

Paul you need to think like a fairy and walk like a fairy.

Very droll. I'm becoming an expert at that.

Ha ha Cog. Now you are seriously back in the white stuff I'll lend you them. With your sylphlike proportions you'd glide across everything that I dropped through! 

You are right. After further research.... that day MSR lightning ascent snowshoes might have coped.

Had a similar sinking experience on Macdui et al last week, though we concurred that when all is said and done, we could maintain our overall forward travel better than in just boots. Mine are 225's.

One of us had larger Canadian-style ali framed ones with complete rubber-like material across them. They were appreciably longer. The problem was that they were so long, any benefit he got over us on the softer stuff was negated by the unwieldy nature of them. TSL's for me..........

I tend to agree with your conclusion and hey, the are fun barring the odd plunge into blackness! I watched YouTube videos and their limitations were rationalised. The MSRs were a good compromise between my TSLs and bin lid sized ones but even with the MSRs some 'stomping' had to be done. As you say progress can be made whereas recently I struggled to make any and friends said when they were ski mountaineering some booted hikers were repelled by impossible walking snow.