[stylist] cane technique in the snow?

[Robert Newman]

Thoughts on cane technique in the snow:

The basic technique needed for snow travel is the same for non-snow travel:
arcing the cane a little wider than your body is always needed. Centering
the cane at the mid point is still relevant. The stride and ark coordination
of ... With the tap at the right, the left heel is coming down and next as
the right leg is coming forward the tip is now arcing to the left, with the
left tap comes the right heel striking the ground and on and on. But what is
different is that the snow is covering the surface we are traveling over and
so it impedes the arcing of the tip, and muffles the tap and changes the
feel under foot. And so each of us tends to find that special balance in
movement of the cane and body to still get the needed info we require to
travel on at speed and safety. So an arching of the cane can be "grosser" as
in higher, with more wrist and arm put into it. Then of course, to get a tap
that tells you something, the tap requires a much harder force and the
result is not so much a tap that will yield a sound that will travel out and
about to give echoes to go by, but may, if it successfully reaches down
through the thickness of the snow to the surface, it can tell you if it is
concrete or dirt or grass. And sure, if the snow is quite thick, the cane
wielder may use a modified "Grab and Stab" technique; grapping the handle of
the cane like you would an ice pick and were going to stab it down into a
bloc of ice, in this case of course, through the blanket of snow down to the
walk; this technique employs a lot of arm movement from left to right, for
going the general rule of keeping the cane/wrist centered. 

Then for what you encounter under foot- In general it is not to hard to
figure out if under the snow is either a once scooped walk or snow matted
grass. And if indeed you are traveling down a walk that once was scooped,
yet is now covered, there will be the "walls" of accumulated snow on either
side which have never been cleared and left to pile up. And yes, slants down
can be trickier to find, drop-offs too. And if you have piles of snow that
have been thrown up by snow-removal equipment, these obstructions can prove
to be puzzling; depending if they consist of frozen hard pack snow or
something you can kick your toes or heels into to gain purchase as you go
over them. 

A very good rule (one that is not only for snow travel), but keep a
conscious ear on your surroundings and use it to guide your direction. For
it is not uncommon to get so engrossed in the struggle to work through what
is immediate to our front, that we lose track of our place within the larger
picture. In fact, sometimes in snow travel, you may go for quite a distance
without having the opportunity to touch base with all the normal touch
points such as a good tap for echoes, or feel for drop-offs,  that we
normally rely upon, and so some travel is by what we call "dead-reckoning"
(this should be the right direction based upon my best guess). And so, it is
important to frequently take stock of what you hear in the far to middle and
near by distances, judging distances and/or angles of various sounds to you.
Like, reading and tracking your movement thru the auditory landscape; paying
attention to paralleling traffic, that you are walking toward a particular
sound or away from it, etc. 

And so ... That is about enough for now. Got to go and shovel some snow; had
our first measurable accumulation needing my attention.