An Epic Boot Failure

This morning my wife and I decided to go for a four-mile hike.  Now this is a trail that we hike on regularly and normally have no problems.  Lately my wife has been complaining about her ankles and so she decided to wear boots instead of athletic shoes.  This led to a major boot failure.

About four years or so ago, she had put a pair of boots in the trunk of her car with her get home bag.  Now she checks her bag a couple of times a year and that includes the boots.  So today, she thinks I will wear those boots because they will give my ankles more support.

She gets them out of the car and they look fine.  Now these boots had leather tops and rubber soles and were fairly expensive when we got them.  Unfortunately, we can’t remember the brand and there are no names left on the boots. A great comment below pointed out that the boots are actually Wolverine brand boots.

Well we start up the trail and everything is going fine.  After about a mile and a half, she says her feet are hurting her.  So she stops and takes a look at her boots.  Then does she get a surprise.  The tread and most of the rubber are gone.  The soles of her boots had disintegrated as she hiked in and we had a boot failure

So now here we are about a mile from the closest place I can get a vehicle too.  So she had to hike out and got a nasty blister.  Looking at the boots you can see that if she had gone much further she would have been walking on her socks.

The only thing that we can figure out is that the heat from being in her car had damaged the rubber.  Approximately a ½ inch of rubber was just gone and it just disintegrated into almost powder.

This is another reason that you should use your gear regularly.  In a real emergency, a boot failure could have been a matter of life and death.  We will be buying her new boots and checking some others.

The post An Epic Boot Failure appeared first on PREPAREDNESS ADVICE.