Or so I thought, until last year’s holiday season came around and I decided that Michelle and I should walk to dinner one night. It was one of those 30-degrees-below-zero evenings, the kind where your eyes immediately tear up and your eyelashes freeze together and then, when you try to pry them apart, fall to the ground like tiny broken icicles. The restaurant was only 15 blocks away, but about 30 seconds in, Michelle gave me a reproachful, frozen-over-eyelashes look and asked, “Why are we doing this again?”

“Because,” I explained, scrambling up an eight-foot snowbank to cross the street, “not being able to go for a walk feels like surrender. We can’t keep letting winter win. We walk to the restaurant in the summer, don’t we? A little windchill shouldn’t change that.” She ignored my outstretched hand and requested an Uber. “Nobody goes for a city walk in winter,” she retorted. “Can’t we just go snowshoeing?”

I hadn’t been snowshoeing since I was a child. In fact, I had no idea that people actually went on snowshoeing expeditions, let alone that snowshoe technology had evolved from the wooden, tennis-racketlike, beaver-tailed objects of my childhood. But I learned all that a few days later, when my younger brother posted some photos of himself and his wife wearing futuristic aluminum contraptions over their winter boots somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.

“We all spend too much of winter freezing because it’s so cold outside,” he enthused, when I called him to discuss. “Snowshoeing is a way to go out there and breathe fresh air and be active in the cold.” Then again, my brother is the sort of titanium-spork-owning outdoor enthusiast who goes on three-week hikes from Yosemite to Mount Whitney, so I wasn’t fully convinced. “Start easy,” he advised. “Beginner trails are really fun. You won’t even need gaiters for that.”

My lack of awareness about the very existence of gaiters (leg covers that help protect your pants when wading through knee-deep snow, he explained), Yaktrax (devices for footwear that help you gain traction on slippery terrain), and “high-performance toe socks” (that prevent moisture and blisters) made me doubt my ability to tackle even a beginner trail. “Anyone can snowshoe,” he insisted, laughing. “It’s just about heading out there and having some quiet time, enjoying nature.”

Inside the Pitcher Inn, in Warren.

Christopher Churchill

To prepare, I checked out snowshoemag.com, which covers everything you could possibly want to know before getting started, including a list of snowshoeing clubs across the country. An article on the site, “First-Timer’s Guide to Snowshoeing,” provided a list of the best places to experience “the world’s fastest-growing winter sport,” and the first destination it mentioned was Vermont, a two-hour drive away. I go there often to visit family and friends, to enjoy the leaves changing color in autumn, and to explore swimming holes on summertime day trips.

As fun as those experiences always are, I soon learned that there’s something incomparably rewarding about snowshoeing — not just finding the holy grail of deep, unscathed powder, but also something as basic as climbing over the limbs of a fallen tree and coming across secret pockets of sphagnum moss poking out from under their veils of snow. On snowshoes in the woods, you are simply “surrounded by the raw material of life,” as Thoreau once put it. He loved walking in the winter, to such an extent that he often marched “eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.”

After I finally slid-walked to the bottom of the mountain, Michelle and I brought our rented snowshoes back to the Mad River Glen pro shop. Noticing our post-hike bliss, the employee there offered to let us keep them overnight at no extra cost, so that we could go on a late-night trek. To cross through the depths of this snow-coated wilderness is to find inspiration all around you. A backcountry farm in the Mad River Valley. Snowshoeing through the darkness of Wiessner Woods ended up being even more transformative than our daylight hike. At an outdoor outfitting company in Stowe called Umiak we hired a nighttime guide, who taught us how to handle the ski poles correctly and use the snowshoes’ risers to walk up hills more effectively. (He also gave me a lesson in how to go downhill without looking like a dubstep dancer.)

Midway through the tour, we stopped in at an old sugarhouse for hot cider and local Cabot cheddar cheese with pepperoni. Aboriginal deer-hide snowshoes were mounted on the wall, a reminder that this tradition dates back to long before Europeans arrived in the New World. In earlier times, snowshoes weren’t for recreation — they were a vital means of transportation in an era when there were no roads. Using them today not only connects us to the land, but to a sense of its past, as well.

Having warmed our insides, we headed back out into the cold night. It was a strange, new feeling to be out there at such an unlikely hour and time of year: a combination of runner’s-high-like elation, magnified by the sedentary urbanite’s sense of accomplishment at having participated in the natural world during wintertime. The wind picked up, causing the shadows cast by the spindly, creaking trees to take on an otherworldly quality. Michelle gazed up at the starry firmament and marveled at the extent of its brightness, so far from light pollution and civilization. An infinite universe of stars above lit up the path as we made our way slowly, happily, through the snowy February night.

Left: Snowshoeing through fresh powder in the Mad River Valley. Right: A backcountry farm in the Mad River Valley.

Corey Hendrickson

A Vermont Snowshoe Primer

Start Easy

If you’ve never gone snowshoeing before, try a beginner trail at one of Vermont’s ski resorts. Stowe, Sugarbush, and Jay Peak all cater to snowshoers, but our favorite is the down-home Mad River Glen. All you need is warm outerwear and comfortable winter boots — rental shops will set you up with snowshoes and ski poles.

Get a Guide

To venture deeper into the wilderness, or to go on a nighttime hike, hire an expert guide from Umiak Outdoor Outfitters, in Stowe, or Ole’s Cross-Country Center (olesxc.com), in Warren.

Stay Somewhere Cozy

The Pitcher Inn is a Civil War–era Relais & Châteaux property in the town of Warren. Everything here is excellent, from the restaurant’s wine list to the hand-cut, Vermont-made Stave puzzles in the library. Try to book the Mountain Room, which has a lovely fireplace, as well as a steam shower and heirloom snowshoes on the wall (pitcherinn.com; doubles from $375).

End Your Day With Pizza and Beer

Vermont produces some outstanding beer (names to look for include Heady Topper and Hill Farmstead) and pizza, and American Flatbread at Lareau Farm highlights the best of both.