Going uphill, the shoes lie flat against the slope but the bindings pivot – and vicious talons beneath your toes pass through holes in the flotation deck to bite into the snow for grip. I tried a pair of Redfeather snowshoes in Austria in the spring, and after two hours it was still obvious that I was a beginner. They spread your body weight over a large area so that you can “float” on the snow. (The size of shoe you wear depends on your weight; but an average pair is 2ft long and 9in wide.)You strap your boots into a binding that pivots under the ball of the foot – and then, according to Redfeather’s publicity, you just start snowshoeing: “The only difference between a beginner and an expert,” it says, “is the first six steps”.This is a slight exaggeration. The weather system is expected to produce a bumper snowfall in the western states. If just slipping out for a beer involves slipping on a pair of snowshoes, imagine what that will do for Redfeather’s sales.A modern snowshoe typically consists of an aluminium frame, wide at the front and tapering to the back, with a rubber-like material stretched across it to form a “flotation deck”.

Think of a pair of stiletto heels: snowshoes are the opposite, and not just in sex appeal. They are worn by competitors in “Mountain Man” triathlons (which combine skiing, skating and snowshoeing), by snowmobilers (you need snowshoes, apparently, to right a capsized snowmobile), and by families who go trekking in the backwoods. All that adds up to 650,000 people altogether, according to US figures for the 1995/6 season.Now, on top of all that and a doubling of the number of US snowshoe stockists (to more than 1,000) this season “the gods are blessing us with El Nino,” says Lyn Cariffe, a vice-president of Redfeather Design, one of the leading US manufacturers. Then, from the late Eighties, snowshoeing took off, to became the fastest growing winter sport in the US.In place of the old wood-and-gut tennis rackets strapped on to fur boots, the new snowshoes are high-tech devices of titanium and man-made polymers, with a binding to grip on to soft boots or shoes – or Nike’s new “Air Spindrift” trainer, specifically for snowshoeing.

Snowshoes have been around for a long time (they are said to have permitted the original colonisation of north America, via the Bering Strait), but their image didn’t develop much for 8,000 years; the snowshoe remained “Nanook of the North” footwear until somebody had the bright idea of adapting it for wilderness jogging in winter. True, this weather system – which starts as a warm patch in the Pacific Ocean and ends up, in a bad year, disturbing climate patterns in much of the southern hemisphere – is not welcome everywhere: farmers in a drought area expected to span South Africa, Indonesia and Australia do not, for example, have cause for celebration.
But among snowshoe manufacturers and suppliers in the US, it’s a different story They’ve already had a good decade. Here, restaurants are materialising overnight, and one recent arrival is the Oriental Grill that’s already a hit among New York’s gourmands.8pm: back to the Scratcher, because there’s still time to pump those flimsy friendships for all they’re worth. Oh, and mention your mansion back in England.Sunday, 9.10pm; JFKSleep.. The technique is simple: walk on flattish snow in shoes that are 10 times too big for you Stephen Wood discovers the arcane art of snowshoeing

Good news: El Nino is coming.

You’ll have to put your skates on to cover the Met’s 3 million exhibits in the hour before the 5.15pm closing, but that still leaves you 45 minutes to luxuriate in the Guggenheim’s 5,000.7pm: where better to end an A-Z of a Manhattan weekend than Alphabet City – on the edge of East River – once a no-go area that is now Manhattan’s most happening restaurant scene. Instead, add weight training – in the form of Sunday’s monster edition of the New York Times – to the usual diner heart-starter.Head up to Bloomingdales, on East 59th and Lexington Avenue, and deliver the coup de grace to your plastic (remember: “the more you spend, the more you save”). From there, weave through and either side of Central Park, the vast chunk of countryside framed by the 20-storey Munster-like towers of Upper East and West sides, all the way through to Harlem, for a stark view of America’s colour divide, and where you’re guaranteed New York Moments, especially if you’re carrying 20 shopping bags.If, however, you’re one New York Moment short of a nervous breakdown, put up the shutters (guidebook and camera) and turn tourist, because you’re conveniently located for New York’s biggest draw card. If you’ve done everything to plan so far, you’d be the worst kind of hypocrite if you walked into a church right now.