The adventures on snowshoes were rather limited this winter, due to the late arrival of the snow and a trip that was cancelled. Eventually I ended up in a place with a very pretty name: Schönberg (translated: pretty mountain) in the Stubaital (Austria, near Innsbruck). There we made three pretty hikes. The weather gods were kind to us: the first day it rained significantly when we departed, but with the car we drove higher up the mountains untill the rain became snow and it snowed the rest of the day. The next day was grey, with a beautifull layer of fresh snow (which resembled the powder sugar on the ‘Kaiserschmarrn’ I had for lunch that day). The third day the sun was shining the whole day.
On almost all of my previous snowshoe hiking trips we had composite snowshoes from TSL (226 Approach if I remember correctly), but this time we had aluminium snowshoes from Nibus. Which are not that good in my opinion, e.g. a ‘heel lift’ (for steep climbing) isn’t available on those shoes. And it was often not that easy to place your shoes correctly in the snowshoe (with the TSL it is fixed very firmly). One of the guides also had another brand: Tubbs (FLEX TRK Snowshoe), but that also had some downsides, e.g. the way the shoes are fixed in the snowshoes came loose regularly (a rubber band). So to conclude: I prefer a good old TSL! 
Eddy
