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It was a cool, cloudy spring morning on Snowbird Mountain heading to Max Patch. As I stopped for lunch, it began to rain. It didn’t stop until sometime in the middle of the night. Hours later, as I poured the water out of my Gore-Tex boots at a shelter, a thru-hiker asked me how they were working out for me. I looked at his trail runners and had to admit, I didn’t much like my boots at that moment. Those boots must have weighed five pounds apiece for the rest of the trip. Two days later in Hot Springs, while I was inspecting the blisters that the wet boots had left me with, I knew something had to change.

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