On the first day of February 1882, 16 AMC members wrestled their luggage through blizzard-ravaged streets toward Eastern Railroad's north Boston terminal. According to an Appalachia account of the trip, the party's eight women and eight men, bound for the White Mountains, had received some "words of warning" from the club's Excursion Committee. In response to these concerns about the dangers of backcountry winter recreation—then in its infancy—the pioneering group carried "a liberal supply of warm clothing and extra wraps."

Once settled in their private car, the AMC members found themselves the object of some curiosity. Other travelers would periodically enter the car, and, "The unbelief of the masses that there were any foolish enough to attempt a pleasure trip to the White Mountains in winter found expression in these individuals." A wisecracking brakeman announced one stop north of Portsmouth as "Greenland."

The group, accustomed to seeing the White Mountains in full summer bloom, watched with wonder as the train chugged toward Glen Station, just beyond North Conway. Through the windows of their car they saw a world they'd previously only imagined. This was the club's first winter excursion and "The party within was enjoying to the utmost the unusual novelty of the trip," reported trip leader John Ritchie Jr., in Appalachia.

Ritchie marveled at the fantastic icicles, sea-green translucent ice walls, and moonlight reflecting off the snow. The party crowded onto the rear of the train to catch a final glimpse of the mountains before heading back to Boston four days later. "The experience of that morning alone was worth the journey," Ritchie recalled.

By decade's end, hundreds of AMC members would be tromping through the frozen forests of New Hampshire, developing winter hiking and mountaineering techniques through trial and error. That inaugural group was underequipped, however, and had just one pair of snowshoes. Their four-day stay consisted largely of sleigh rides, except for the climb of Thorn Mountain that two men completed.

One year later, 11 AMC members traveled to Randolph, N.H. An attempt on Mount Adams was the highlight of their trip. In the days preceding the climb, four men practiced their snowshoe technique and bought "ice creepers" from a local blacksmith. The studded metal plates would provide traction should the snow turn to ice. Finally, with the aid of two guides, they attacked the mountain. "Each of us carried a compass and a spirit flask," wrote Samuel H. Scudder—a founding vice president of AMC and one of the Mount Adams climbers—in Appalachia. "Necessary appendages of the cautious pioneer."

A biting wind and encroaching clouds greeted the party above treeline. Half the group pushed on, only to be rebuffed farther up the slope, barely 100 meters below the peak. Despite their retreat, the attempt was historic. The first ascent of Mount Washington in winter conditions didn't happen until the 1850s, and very little winter climbing had taken place since. Authors Laura and Guy Waterman, in their book Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains, credited the group with "in many ways [starting] 'serious' recreational winter climbing."

Growing interest in winter recreation led to the creation in 1886 of AMC's Snow-Shoe Section, a special division of the club focused on encouraging winter activities and developing the new winter excursions. The Snow-Shoe Section—one of three such groups to appear in the Northeast around this time—had 46 original members. According to their first annual report, 26 of the members owned snowshoes and were "tolerably familiar with their use."

Twenty of the section's original members were women, and from the start they took part in the most serious winter summit attempts, despite the day's social norms—and the customary long skirts that could quickly collect snow and ice along their hems.

Accounts of early annual excursions reveal a curious and fun-loving group of explorers. Ritchie, in another Appalachia story, recounted the "spice of adventure" on an 1888 descent from Tin Mountain. The group grasped at trees to maintain control as the descent steepened, but "sometimes...it was the tree which caught the man." Ritchie helped someone he found "hanging turkey-like by his feet, with his head down the slope." A 1903 ascent of Wildcat—the first in winter—ended with the climbers sliding 1,000 feet down into Carter Notch on the frozen bed of a brook.

On that same 1888 trip, the AMC members glimpsed the future of winter recreation—another party having left behind a pair of "skees." "We did not have the leisure to master these foreign shoes," Ritchie recalled. "But we did experiment enough to learn that there is a great deal of fun to be had with them.... When the skees mark out for themselves...the resultant force is always in the vertical and the downward." But then what? The group, unable to figure out how to ascend, resorted to tying a skier to a snowshoer and towing the former to higher ground.

As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, the snowy mountains had never been so accessible. AMC published equipment guides, hosted gear exhibitions, and contributed to the development of new technologies. Though snowshoes have a long history, new recreational uses had created new needs. Thanks in part to the pioneering climbs of the Snow-Shoe Section, different styles of snowshoes emerged for different terrain and snow conditions. A 1914 Appalachia story about ice creepers designed specifically for AMC members also described recent snowshoe advances:

This Club has...taken great pride in the evolution of a most successful snow-shoe, designed solely for the hard climbing of the New Hampshire mountains. A snow-shoe, no doubt, useless in Labrador and not much good for fox hunting in the Maine woods. The older members will well remember the first snow-shoe trips, when the long evenings were mostly spent struggling with temporary repairs.

Though the story didn't include a picture of the mountaineering snowshoes, later models were shorter and proportionally wider than traditional models. The toes would have been flat, rather than slightly upturned, and the bindings may have included some type of built-in creepers for extra traction.

As the ranks of the Snow-Shoe Section swelled, the focus broadened. By 1910, 141 people—or nearly 10 percent of AMC's total membership—attended the annual winter excursion. An interest in serious mountaineering remained, but the annual excursions also developed a high "fun quotient." Members competed in races, tugs-of-war, and ladder climbs while clad in snowshoes. Snow sculptures and tobogganing also joined sleigh rides as mainstays on the agenda.

In just a few short decades, an entire winter recreation industry had blossomed in the Northeast. Snowshoeing had become mainstream, and by 1918 AMC leaders saw no reason to continue planning winter excursions outside of the club's regular structure. Following a vote that determined "the pioneer work of the Section [had] been accomplished," its work was passed to the Excursion Committee.

The rapid emergence of skiing further fueled the growth of winter recreation, and created some rivalries. In 1932, Appalachia published the haughty "What of the Snowshoe," a sarcastic takedown of the sport by a ski-loving writer. "Certainly no one who has experienced both will for a moment set the scrunch-scrunch of snowshoes beside the whish-whish of skis.... One may ask whether the climbs for which [the snowshoe] is appropriate are worth doing—when one might be skiing instead!"

This, of course, was hyperbole. Snowshoes remain valued by the aficionado and the skier alike, essential for breaking new trails, reaching unskiable peaks, and for tromping through the peaceful, snow-covered mountains.