For those who have experienced it, the Squaw Valley parking lot can be a notoriously muddy slush-fest where shoes go to die. After a day of riding through a brutal rainstorm on the mountain we found ourselves in the parking lot feeling cold, wet and ready to get out of our soaked snowboarding gear. I ripped off my snowboard boots and threw on my checkered slip-ons of a certain skate shoe brand. Before I could take four steps from the trunk to the driver’s seat, they were soaked with water and covered with mud. It wasn’t the shoes fault, they just weren’t designed for those type of environments. Growing up in Southern California, we couldn’t bring ourselves to buy the clunky, stiff, and (in our opinion) not so stylish snow/après-ski boots offered by the major brands. We would wear our skate shoes when we went to the mountains, and they would leave our feet cold and wet. Enough was enough, something had to be done.
We had a vision when we began to design what would someday become the Senger Scout; it was an idea we had been playing with for several years. We wanted to create a shoe that we could wear whenever we went up to the mountains. It had to look good, it had to be weatherproof, and it had to feel solid while remaining flexible and lightweight. Most importantly, it also had to be easy to slip into after a day on the slopes. We looked to the past and found inspiration from the après-ski boots of the 70s and 80s. After several iterations and prototypes we finally came up with something that we were proud to wear ourselves, and the Senger Scout was born.
No more wet socks and cold feet in the parking lots of our local ski areas.