They are two of my greatest passions.
The first is going for long walks in the woods behind our house.
The second is walking on stilts.
Question: Is it possible to combine the two? Let’s find out.
I’m nice and bundled up, not too bundled up however because I still want to be able to move freely.
I’m walking into the woods, dragging a pair of hand-held stilts behind me. Normally I use the pair of stilts that strap onto your lower leg and have platforms with shoes attached to them. However, for this endeavour, I will use hand-held stilts, mostly because if I start falling I can easily jump out of them, whereas with the other pair all you can do is pray for a soft landing.
I reach the wood cutting trail, trails that have been cleared of dead fall so there is less worry of landing on a pointy stick.
Bringing the stilts in front of me, I plant them in the snow. The snow is so deep that the stilts sink all the way to the foot platforms, around two feet deep. When I’m up on the stilts it will probably look like I’m standing right on the surface of the snow. This might be an interesting trick to try in water.
I crouch down and jump up onto the platforms, I then start to shuffle my feet up and down, backwards and forwards as necessary, which is the normal way to keep your balance while on stilts seeing as you no longer have the tilting action of your foot.
Unfortunately, the snow was so deep and hard-packed that I couldn’t move forward or backward, at least not without great difficulty. So, I jumped off as I started to fall backwards.
The only way that I could see this working in the deep snow was if I lifted my feet really high and then set them back down, thus not having to force my foot through two feet of hard-packed snow.
I had varied success with this technique, finally discovering that if I looked strait ahead while walking it kept my body far more centred. I only made a grand total of eight steps forward before falling off.
Now, thoroughly coated in snow from the numerous falls, I finally made it to my fort which is just a little ways up the trail from where I started. Leaning the stilts against a tree, I trudged over to my home-made swing and sat down.
The twine holding the swing up promptly snapped and dumped me in the snow.
Is it possible to walk on stilts though the forest? Yes, but it would probably be much easier if you tried it during the summer.
Until the next time …
