Toe warmers

Right now it’s 18F, warmest it’s been in a week with -20 F a few nights, typical winter riding weather here. Toe warmers go out from lack of O2 in boots. I’ve had better results with hand warmers in boots but they can be bulky and uncomfortable. Electric sox aren’t warm enough for me. The best solution I’ve found are the very light above ankle Baffin snowmobile boots. I put hand warmers in them and ride with flats. I can ride at -15F. with face covering, layers you can peel off as you warm, lobster claw gloves with hand chemical warmers in each compartment and 4 or 5 chemical hand warmers in the neoprene hooded hand covers. If it’s too warm out these get too hot and burn, or if the chemical sack ruptures you will get burned. This only happened once and I had to takeoff one glove. I seal the warmers in small zip lock bags after each ride and I can usually get 2-4 rides out of them as they go out from lack of O2. I guess they could rupture in your boots and burn but I have been doing this for years no problem.

Do those toe warmers help? Sure. Does it fix the problem if you have Raynaud's? No. Fixing that problem takes a combination of methods and some trial and error. In general, I need a lot warmer boots than a lot of other people wear for the same temps. I have a setup that can go to about -35F pretty comfortably, but I wear the same basic boot, minus the over-boot cover, up to around 25-28F.

A lot of us on the Iditarod trail/race are using a very similar setup. Silk sock (thin), Rab vapor barrier (100x better than bread-bags), then Wiggy's lamilite socks, except these are kind of more like liners. I sewed little pockets above the toe so I can drop chem heaters in em, which works well and means I don't have to try and "stick" them to socks or anything, just drop and put the foot back in the shoe and go.

But it took a lot of hard lessons for me to realize I'd rather have warm toes and be happy riding, rather than fight it out with insufficient footwear. Some of the "winter" stuff has been real laughable, especially back 5-10 years ago. Now with the prevalence of fat-biking, there are some serious options you can use...and they work fine for not-fatbiking too.

ddoh said:

JM: What boot? What cover?

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Boots: Wolfgar for anything about 28 degrees and less...down to -35, the coldest I've hit a few times. At about -30, I put Dogwood Designs over-boots on them, they are insulated covers that also function as gaiters. These boots in general work a lot better for me than my older Wolfhammers. The Wolfhammers are fairly pathetic IME, they do not handle freezing temps for my toes and are best at about 40-30 degrees, a relatively narrow comfort range. The Wolfgar has the big felt liner that works well to absorb sweat (if not using a vapor barrier) which still leads to a fair amount of comfort even in relatively warm temps. None of these are good ideas though for flat pedals.

OR makes some good boot covers too, for alpine stuff. Wiggy's too, but some of these get to be so big they start to hinder pedaling due to their bulk (the overboots).

It's a lot better to buy the warmer boot IME if you are going to be occasionally riding in say, teens, rather than, buy the colder boot and just "make do" with it when it gets colder. You end up hating those rides and conditions IME. Conversely though, you can just load up on foot-warmers, but you need a big enough boot to start with to handle big socks and some additional stuff. That's another way that people tend to shoot themselves in the foot, it's very very hard to buy a big enough boot the first time through, you can build up the foot bed with various insoles and things, but you can never make a smaller boot bigger. One size larger isn't enough for the real cold winter stuff IME.