Traveling for Boots

Main Street, Casper Wyoming.

When I was a boy here, which is now a very long time ago, there were at least two downtown stores that sold boots for outdoorsmen.  There may have been more, but I know that there were at least two.

One of them was a shoe store that carried the Red Wing brand, among other offerings.  Around the time I was a senior in high school, by which time my feet had quit growing, I bought, or rather my father bought for me, a pair or Red Wing logging boots.  They were my first real pair of really good purpose built outdoor boots, replacing the cheaper Red Wing type boots I wore as a kid, and a pair of very well worn Corcoran paratrooper boots I'd acquired from the Civil Air Patrol while I was in junior high.

For those who don't know, logging boots and boots in that family, are the best rough country boot around. They're fantastic.  Far better than the synthetic "boots" so many wear today.  And the Red Wing loggers were typical.  I wasn't the only one who had a pair, another one of my friends did. The boots lasted for years and years, being on endless hunting trips in all kinds of terrain around Wyoming, serving me as a geology student in the field, where they went up and down ridges in New Mexico and Colorado, and even being my footgear (they had steel toes) when I worked on a drilling rig one summer.  I don't know when they finally gave up the ghost, but it would have been probably around ten years ago, at which time they'd have had decades of use.

Before they died (and I'd acquired various other more narrow purpose boots in the meantime), I lucked into two pairs of Hathorn boots, a brand built by Whites.  One pair is their Farmer and Rancher boot, and the other their Smokejumper boot.  They were being carried by Big R, a farm and ranch store here locally, and they were their demonstrator models that were in my small foot size.  They were half off in price.

For those who don't know, everything built by Whites is fantastic.  They're the Mercedes Benz of outdoors boots.  These two pair are the most comfortable shoes I own and I'd wear them every day but for the fact you really can't in my daily job.

My son is now at the age where his feet aren't going to get any bigger. So it was time for some outdoor boots.  Easy task?  

Not so much.

My what a change in local offerings.  We looked everywhere.  The old shoe store downtown has been closed for years.  The other place I know that had boots closed in the 1970s, I think, and the couple of other places that used to have hunting boots locally are gone as well.  One store downtown that used to carry Whites no longer does, and the store that replaced Big R doesn't either.

In their place are various places that advertise boots. But they are overwhelmingly the type of boots, cheap boots in my view, that are aimed at men working in the oilfield. They aren't good outdoorsmen's boots and aren't worth having in my view.  A couple of sporting goods stores offer the modern composite type boot which is nothing better than a light hiker.  And two offer Danners, which are legendary, but Danner's boots offered here locally are invariably insulated, which isn't something that's universally a good thing for outdoorsmen.  Light hikers are fine for trails, but they're not a serious boot either, which serious outdoorsmen usually learn at their expense.  We could find, literally, nothing.

Now, in fairness, before I go on, a Red Wing store just opened here.  I didn't bother to go there.  We probably should have, but this point we determined to go the one place nearby. . . 120 miles distant, that we knew had Whites and Hathorns.  A store in Sheridan.

It's a great little locally owned store.  It has a fantastic selection of boots of all types.  It carried Hathorns and Whites in stock, and in more than one variety.  We were in luck.

But what an odd odd development.

In 1981, when I was young, you could get logging boots.  And I suspect that if I'd gone next door to where I'd gotten those, I could have gotten smoke jumpers.  I know that I could have gotten smoke jumpers or great packers in that latter store as recently as the 90s anyhow, and maybe more recently than that.

Not now.  Now, everything for a person's foot, shoe wise, is either going to be an oilfield boot of dubious utility for anything else, or a light hiker.

It probably makes sense that the store in Sheridan has a better offering, even if it's in a smaller town. The oilfield isn't a big deal in Sheridan and the mountains are.  It's a tourist town too, with some of those tourist being people headed out in the game fields and the fishing streams.  So there's likely a ready set market.

But you would think things would be different in Casper.  They should be, really.