Skishoes in Minnesota

Hok skiing on the North Country National Scenic Trail   I first heard of Hok skis several years ago from North Country Trail Association (NCTA) volunteers Jim & Jeri Rakness. They kept insisting that I really needed to try them out. At first, I couldn’t imagine what it was they were describing and, to be […]

Moose Population Study – Yellowstone National Park

  My wife Lisa and I initiated a 3 year non-invasive moose population study in the Northern Range of Yellowstone National Park and adjacent Custer-Gallatin National Forest in 2013. The goal of the study was to use non-invasively collected DNA to estimate population size and parameters of the northern Yellowstone moose.

Tiaks (single poles) Part 1

Tiak [tīăk] means stick in the local languages in the Altai Mountains of North Central Asia. Tiak is also the name for the single pole used in all the traditional skiing in that region. Prior to 1900, the single pole was used by pretty much all skiers in the world!

Hoks in the School

Eliminating Nature Deficit Disorder! 🙂 Last year we started getting requests from schools for Hoks so the kids could go skishoeing around their school grounds (yes, some people are lucky enough to live where they can do that from school).

100 Days of Hoks Skiing

100 Days of Hok Skiing by Sharon Coyle   It was an almost impossible objective, even in a town north of the 50th parallel where the snow lasts until May: 100 Days of Hok skiing in one winter season. What the heck, if I didn’t make it to one hundred, at least I would keep […]

Tracking cougars in Yellowstone

The National Park Service’s Yellowstone Cougar Project embraced the Hok skis for their winter field work studying Yellowstone’s most elusive large carnivore. Biologists have been conducting intensive snow-tracking surveys in Yellowstone’s rugged winter terrain to detect cougar tracks and follow them through common travel routes to bed sites, scent marking sites, and prey remains.

Great Video from Ontario!

Andrew Morrisey and his friends really captured the backyard backcountry aspect of skishoes. They are having lots of fun close to home. A big thanks to these guys as this is a lot of time involved in making a video like this.