Gunfighter

yellowdog762 · Joined: 23 Jul 2007 Posts: 46

I like Tevas for all kind of reasons, many of which never occurred to me until I went to the far north.

I like them best because you can wear socks with them. That sounds geeky I know but they will let you carry a second or third pair of light weight shoes with you when traveling. Any brand of sandal without a thong between the toes will work. Unless you wear a sandal with a toe thong much of your waking life you are probably going to get a terrible blister between your toes if you try wearing thong sandals in any kind of dusty or damp conditions. If you are kicked back at the beach cantina in Cancun you will probably want to dispense with the socks though.

You can wear Tevas and warm socks around camp, a cabin or a tent on a cold wet day while you let your feet and boots dry out. I have even seen hikers in the back country of Alaska hiking the trail in their socks and Tevas while they aired out their boots and dried their feet.

In many places it is actually very hard to get wet clothing to completely dry out without an electric cloths dryer and camp fires and gas heaters are death to poly socks. Wearing boots with damp socks and wet feet for a long period of time is just asking for trouble but you can wear damp socks with Tevas and your body heat will dry out your socks pretty fast, even in high humidity conditions like coastal Alaska or a Texas deer lease after a gully washer.

Tevas are also great to slip on in the middle of the night to answer the call of nature, spiders and scorpions don’t have a place to hide in them. I’ve even worn them when showering in some icky public showers.

Wool socks are much better than cotton in most situations but some kinds of polypropylene socks are just as warm as wool and they often dry much faster.

I like black or dark socks when I can find them as they are also easier to dry in the sun if it comes to that.

By the way, if you leave socks out to dry in wind, hang them in camp or dangle them from your pack, use a safety pin and some string to secure them or eventually you come up at least one sock short