Person B and I purchased a cabin near Lake Cle Elum (just east of Snoqualmie Pass and the Central Cascades and PCT in central Washington State) a couple months ago so I’ve been pretty heads-down with home improvement stuff. So, this month I’m not-so-proudly presenting the saddest Loot! post yet with only a single, lonely (but potentially very important) purchase:
Salomon XA Pro 3D Wide
After giving up on flimsy Altra trail runners due to their lack of cushion and uselessness off trail I’ve been rocking Oboz Sawtooth Low hiking shoes for the entire 2019 season and I’ve really enjoyed them. However, they are both significantly heavier than trail runners (987 grams per pair, or over a pound per shoe) and they also don’t dry worth a damn, most likely due to all the leather on top.
I’ve spent far too many hours at REI trying on the various burlier models of trail runners but could never find something comfortable because my feet are borderline wide and everything was crushingly narrow. So, when a recent thread on r/ultralight regarding wide trail runners made me aware that Salomons actually come in wide I decided to re-evaluate.
At around the same time I discovered that Amazon’s Prime Wardrobe service isn’t actually a StitchFix clothing subscription knock-off as I had assumed. Instead, it’s a try-before-you-buy service where you get clothes delivered for free and you only pay for anything you don’t return (also for free) within a week. This solves the usual online clothes shopping problem where you have to order two or three sizes of an item with the expectation that you’ll only keep one and then return the others. So, instead of forking over $400 for three pairs of shoes and then having to wait for the returns to clear to get my refund I only had to pay $130 for the best-fitting pair and the returns on the other two were free. Not too shabby!
And so I found myself with a pair of brand-new Salomon XA Pro 3Ds in size 11 wide. Without the stock insoles they weigh 400 grams per shoe. The Oboz weigh either 494 or 451 grams each depending on whether I weighed them with the insoles or not (note to self: double-check when I get back to Seattle) so the total weight savings is 3.5 to 6.5 ounces. I wouldn’t call it monumental but if you follow the “a pound on the foot is worth five in the pack” rule of thumb based on US Army research that means I’m saving the equivalent of 1 to 2 pounds of gear in my pack which would be a massive improvement.
I did some initial drying time tests by dunking one each of the Oboz and Salomons in water and measuring how fast they dried. Results: not fast, like 3-4 grams of water per hour after absorbing about 100 grams of water each. That seems terrible but I have no prior experience drying shoes so there’s not much to compare against (also, it isn’t like shoes sit there air drying, they’re heated by your feet, so this test seems unrealistic).What I did notice is that the foam soles of the Salomons don’t absorb water so as the other materials drain into the inside of the shoe you can just turn it over and pour the water out. This was not the case with the Oboz, the fuzzy fabric on the inside bottom held water. I’m not sure this is of any practical significance since I would imagine your foot would be in the shoe and the sock would be soaking up whatever water was available regardless. I’ll keep plugging away at this to see if I can get a definitive comparison.
($130, 400 grams per shoe in size 11 wide)
Superfeet Trailblazer Comfort Insoles
Well, I lied: all this shoe talk reminded me that I actual made a pair of related purchases. In the eons since I last purchased Superfeet insoles it appears that they’ve released a new model called the Trailblazer Comfort which look very similar to the Oboz insoles except that they have a hard plastic heel cup. Since the outsoles on the Salomons are significantly less burly than the ones on the Oboz I thought it would make sense to compensate with the hard plastic. However, after some around-the-house testing I found that these insoles lacked the comfort of the Oboz insoles so I ditched them.
($50, 61 grams per insole in size E)
Oboz O Fit Insole Plus
Oboz is known for actually including really good insoles with their shoes. In fact, you can buy them separately for use in other shoes as well. Assuming you do what I assume most people do when they get new shoes which is toss out the crap factory insoles before replacing them with $50 Superfeet then the fact that this additional cost is already included in the Oboz price means they’re one of the most affordable shoe brands on the market.
In any case, my Oboz were old enough that they shipped with whatever model of insole predated the Plus model. When the insoles started to lose cushion but the shoes were still in good working order I upgraded to a pair of this new fancier model early in the season. They were fantastic. So when I picked up the Salomons I thought it would also make sense to get a second pair of the Plus insoles just for them, both because I was already used to how they felt as well as for out-of-the-box comparison with the Superfeet. The Oboz won by a good margin on comfort alone, but they’re also cheaper and lighter than the Trailblazer Comforts. Win-win-win.
($30, 43 grams per insole in size large)