The Hiking Boot Autopsy

I had a special relationship with my hiking boots. We really went places together. There are memories made from shared experiences. We made time for us to hit the trails. I have quite a number of “remember that time” recollections. Like that tough climb up to an overlook, kicking my feet up once we got there, and sharing the view with those boots, or, when we together and kept a firm footing on water slick rocks at the river.

I realized our time was drawing to a close – it was when I had a case of wet feet, literally. The soul and character of the boot, was again literally – at the waterproof sole of the boot. The leathery skin still looked sound, but wet surroundings soon had my feet feeling as if they were wearing wet diapers. Then, one fine day, we broke at the seams, and I had no choice but to give in to a memorial burial of those boots to the trash bin.

But, like many others, I’d watched way too many forensic based crime dramas, so the push was overwhelming to determine a cause of demise, through – boot autopsy.

I suspected dismembering the boot would show evidence that the boot liner damage would be underneath those broken seams, causing the water to bleed into the boot from above. But, when I gingerly cut into the boot, what was revealed, was that I was wrong. When I saw the real cause of demise, I nearly had to pick myself up by my bootstraps, after having been floored in disbelief.

What I’d learned is that the waterproof liner failed at the bottom of the shoe, right under the ball of the foot, underneath the shoes insole. An area I would have thought to be least susceptible to wear and tear.

To get a simple mental picture of this, we can take a standard sock, and put the shoe insole INTO the sock, and then place them both into the boot. A hiking boots multilayered inner waterproof sock, is of course, more complex … it would look like this in a cutaway diagram … having the waterproof membrane sandwiched between two sock layers.

And, for reasons unknown and not understood by me – these inner liners failed underneath the sole insert at the front of the foot. The foot of the sock and lower waterproof liner looked like this:

And so, the hiking boot autopsy provided an unexpected and surprising find, into exploring the cause of it’s demise. As a “footnote”, we could say the forensic investigation brought to light an unexpected twist in the tale – and only if a shoes tongue could talk, could we understand this unsolved mystery.

{There is a narrated video that accompanies this blog in the video section.}