The very helpful ladies in the store assured me that it was warm. They also were trying to convince me of how stylish was, but i think that might have been overkill on their part. I'm not going for style. I stopped going for style sometime around 1989 or so. I'm going for function & convenience. I wanted boots that would make the transition between outdoor recess duty & indoor time that much quicker, so i got these.
They have a good thick tread. The lower part is rubber, the upper part is leather. This combines the best of both worlds (petroleum based products & the meat industry).
Funny...this reminds me of a story from my childhood. Not sure if i've written this here before, but maybe you should check after you read this & see if i've messed up the details.
Back when i was in boy scouts, i was absolutely terrible with the outdoors & outdoorsmanship in general. I couldn't start a fire or tie knots or earn badges. I stayed in scouts because i liked playing dodgeball on Tuesday nights & i was friends with most of the guys in my troop. We ended up going winter camping sometime towards the end of January.
It was awful.
I was completely underprepared for the winter climate. We happened to go on a horrendously cold weekend - it actually reached below -20 degrees celsius. We were sleeping in tents. We were smart enough to build snow walls around our tents to cut down on the wind so it really wasn't so bad at night. I had received a really good sleeping bag that was good to minus 40 (sadly, i lost it about 7 years ago).
The one thing that i did not have to help me was proper winter footwear. Somehow, despite my complete lack of interest in all things Western, i had been sporting a pair of rubber cowboy boots that winter. They were lined with fake wool and unfortunately froze up on me within 15 minutes of arriving at the campsite. For the next couple of days i was in agony as it felt like my feet were going to shatter & fall off.
Most of the guys were pretty helpful about it all - some of them told me to take off the boots & warm my feet by the fire, which helped. While we were out and about all day Saturday, my feet were killing. To take my mind off the whole thing, i joined a group of fellows on a tobaganing run - one of the guys had brought the tobagon his mom had owned as a child. Sadly we crashed it into a tree & pretty much destroyed it.
I kept moving to try to maintain warmth, but it wasn't fun. Most of the other guys had much better boots...or so it seemed.
We woke up Sunday morning to find that nearly all of our boots had frozen solid overnight. Mine were solid & the rubber wouldn't flex anymore. I was not, however, the worst off of the bunch. Many of the guys were sporting insulated Kodiak style boots, which were made of leather...leather that had actually become saturated with water as we had tobagganed, ice fished, etc throughout the previous day. I was lucky because when i put my boots by the fire, the rubber warmed up pretty quickly & became flexible enough to put them on. The guys who had leather boots weren't so lucky, and it took hours for theirs to thaw. Fortunately most of those guys had brought skis, so they put on their cross country ski shoes and went skiing while their boots thawed out. The rest of us sat around pouring camping fuel onto the picnic table & lighting it on fire.
Anyway, the weekend eventually ended, i got horribly sick with the flu for 5 days & never went winter camping again.
So moral of the story? I don't know. Don't leave kids alone with flamable liquids? Don't lend out family heirlooms if you want them back whole?
Frankly, i have no idea how all those cowboys survived the winter.
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