River Shoe Traction Test
What is the Stickiest Shoe on the Market?
A lot of people ask us what is the river shoe with the best traction on the market and the answer is no one really tests that...until now. We devised our first in a series of tests to help measure shoe traction. It turned out the answer was more complex than we first thought. In this video we teamed up with our friend Kristin from the River Store to learn what is the shoe with the most traction. We started this testing journey by utilizing a simple lever arm slip test on a sample piece. In this test we tested the following shoes:
Astral pfd sandal
Brewess 2.0
Adidas trail cross
Vans skate shoe
La Sportiva TX-3
Rassler 2.0
Chaco Z cloud
River Shoe Traction Test Methodology
In this test we built a lever arm from a 2x4 anchoring it by a rod at one end. We built a cradle for our sample piece that we would be using to test shoes on. We then leveled and attached a protractor to the base of the lever arm with a notched mark to measure the angle of the arm.
We tested each shoe on the list by adding a 3 pound weight inside the shoe and placed it on the sample piece. To measure the results we lifted the arm until the shoe broke traction and slipped on the sample piece. We repeated this test with all of the shoes on the list while both the rock and the shoe were dry. We then saturated the sample piece with water and applied 5 sprays from the same spray bottle to the sole of the shoe with the same weight inside and repeated the test.
River Shoe Traction Results
We understand that this is not an all encompassing test and after we completed the test and shared the initial results it was clear that there were a few points we could improve on. For this test the numbers loosely correlate to the angle of the sample piece so we will are calling this the Rafting Magazine Traction Rating. Its clear we have some work to do on the test, but the numbers that we have come up with are certainly an interesting look at the traction each shoe can provide. The highlights of the test are as follows:
Only the TX Canyon shoe increased traction while wet and was best overall.
Most shoes performed in a similar range of within 10% traction loss when wet and most shoes also performed within around 10% of each other.
The sandals were the lowest wet traction, however that may not be the soles and it may be the test itself.
Street shoes like Kristin’s Vans skate shoe while one of the worst shoes were only around 10% worse in traction compared to the other more common river shoes people are wearing.
Future Test Improvements
First increasing the weight both in the shoe and filling out the entire shoe with weight would create more accurate results on how your foot fills out the shoe and how much the shoe conforms to the rock. We also want to test multiple sample pieces to check the results of these samples to understand how different rocks change the numbers. Finally it was proposed that we change the test to have a static sample piece and measure the total force it takes for the shoe to break traction with a human standing in the shoe.