Gear Review: Stuffitts Shoe Savers Snuff Soggy Smell

Do this: Add Stuffitts Shoe Savers to your snowshoe gear now, and stop frightening even the skunks. Find a whole new you — making new friends, even have your old ones hanging around you again. And, stop stinkin’ up the races at the same time. Here’s how:

Snowshoeing is a hot sport, no doubt about it. I’m not referring to its soaring popularity, though Mom Nature is generously promoting the sport by sharing snow with an ever-expanding geography if this winter is any indication. Atlanta as a host city anyone?

Rather, this references the heat an active snowshoer generates even in the coldest of days, producing gobs of sweat. Those running shoes or boots attached to your favorite snowshoe brand, cuddling your feet all nice, snug, and warm, are getting damp on every step. They become like a bucket collecting rain from a downspout. Snow gathers on the forefront and melts; snow crawls over and into the shoe and melts; your feet perspire . . . yes! Even those dainty feet with ‘purty painted-nails perspire.

Then, of course, footgear attracts dirt like a magnet to paper clips even on vista trails of fluffy white. Maybe that’s why they’re white — we’re sweeping up all the dirt as we silently vacuum along.

Finishing the day’s trek or race, you put this grimy blend in the snowshoe-mobile, crank the heat on high with the fan maxed out. Congratulations!  You’re piloting a nomadic smelly-bacteria incubator that ‘tinks as my daughter once said.

Here is a smelly axiom: If you can smell your shoes, everyone else already has.

Here is the prescription, smelly patient: Dr. Snow counsels you, “Take it and Stuff it.” No, no, the Doctor doesn’t mean you need to do something untoward; Doc is talking about nixing your odor problem right now — with Stuffitts. Print this out:

Prescription: Get a Pair of Stuffitts Shoe Savers Now. Go to Fleet Feet Shoes and buy them or go to www.stuffitts.com  and order them. But for the sake of us all, do it now.

They’re like having a portable cedar-closet wrapped with technical cloth ready to insert in your shoes. This handiest of products is shaped amazingly as feet should look — as if we remembered, you know, back in the time without the black toes and hammer-toe kinks and yucky looks most snow and trail athletes wear as badges of pride. An insert filled with highly aromatic cedar, wrapped with technical material, slips in the foot shaped technical cover, maximizing drying power. Stuffitts dries your shoes in about an hour versus a day when they lay in the back seat; plus these little foot miracles capture a ton of shoe-stinky.

Why are they packed with Eastern Red Cedar? This spicy and resinous juniper is a natural repellent to everything odorific. The little ‘chippettes of wood’ are like miniature shoe-soldiers fighting dual enemies of moisture and demon odorites all at once.

Stuffitts are your multi-tasking odor warriors.

Handily, the two Stuffitts ‘feet’ are attached to one another with — naturally enough — two-foot straps so they don’t get separated or lost. I’m beginning to think Stuffitts is another way of saying, “Hey, that’s smart.” They’re thinking of everything.

Check this out: Not only can you order them in Royal Blue, Big-Bopper Black, Tiny (well, they call it ‘light’) Blue, and Real Red; for the more stylish among us, there is “Pretty in Pink” Pink! Of course, all sizes for both genders (and kids) are available.

In “Apocalypse Now,” Colonel Kilgore remembers, “That gasoline smell in the morning . . . it smells like victory.” With Stuffitts, you can smell like a cedar victor even if you don’t medal at the Nationals. You won the fight against stinking up America!

And how would it be if you do medal, yet no one wants to stand near you on the podium because of your dastardly shoe-stench ? Better add those Stuffitts to your casual shoes.

How will your feet feel, what do they think about Stuffitts — amazingly, mine sent the answer in this photo, left:

www.stuffitts.com

Comments on this article? Concerned I can’t spell ‘pretty’? Want to raise a ‘stink?’
email phillipgary@snowshoemag.com

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About Phillip Gary Smith

Phillip Gary Smith, Senior Editor, published "The 300-Mile Man" about Roberto Marron's historic doubling of the Tuscobia 150 mile endurance snow run. He publishes "iHarmonizing Competition" on various forms of competition, including drag racing, his favorite motorsport. Earlier, he wrote "HARMONIZING: Keys to Living in the Song of Life" as a manual for life with chapters such as Winning by Losing, Can God Pay Your Visa Bill?, and a young classic story, The Year I Met a Christmas Angel. His book, "Ultra Superior," is the first written on the Superior Trail ultra-distance events. He mixes writing with his profession--the venture capital world--a dying art. He is a creator of CUBE Speakers, a group espousing themes in "HARMONIZING: Keys" in a unique way. Currently, he has two books in the works. Write to him at Phillip@ultrasuperior.com, or find him on Twitter or Facebook @iHarmonizing.