Black Toes

   Your boots seem to fit fine, until the last day coming out of the mountains.  When you get back home, you notice your toes hurt and eventually the nails of one or two toes turn black.  A couple months later, your ugly black toe nails fall off to be replaced by nice soft pretty pink ones.  What happened? Basically, you smashed and bruised your toes repeatedly into the front of your boot for much of the downhill day.

   Are Black Toes preventable?  Yes.  Below are some basic suggestions --

• Clip your toe nails.
• Your boots may need to be at least 1/2 size larger than you think.
• Make sure you have good arch supports
• Tightly lace your boots in the toe and mid section to keep your foot from sliding forward to the toes.

    Fail at any one of these points and you are likely to end up bruising your toenails and end up with the dreadedly ugly black toe.

    Some other comments on this issue may be helpful.

• You're going to be fooled into thinking your boots fit fine during average warm up hikes.  Black toes happen when you are pushing your body to the max, not some simple "break in" hike.  
• When you hike downhill for a prolonged time, your arches will 'flatten out'.  This happens because of the stress of weight of your body and pack putting a lot of stress on your arches.
  • With poor arch support in your boot, your foot will increase in size up to 1 size resulting in black toes from a too small boot that under other circumstances fits fine.  This is also a cause of blisters.
• Many arch supports are marginal at best.
  • Many boot makers skimp on good arch support in order to save an ounce or two in boot wieght as well as in cost. Also, not everyone has high arches and a flat support feels good to them.
  • There are good after market arch supports. My favorite are "Second Winds". I almost routinely discard the arch supports of most every boot I buy and replace them with a good arch support before hitting the trail. I can't recall ever finding good arch supports in off the shelf boots.
• Check the lacing several times during the downhill hike and retighten as necessary.
  • It might also help to occasionally place a half square knot in a few laces to slow the slippage of laces.   
  • The repetitive motion of hiking downhill will loosen up your laces over a couple hours so that your toes will eventually start to smash into the front of your boot -- especially with the slippery but pretty synthetic laces many boots have these days.

   Knowing all of this doesn't mean that I still haven't occasionally ended up with black toes.  Where I fail these days is usually not checking the laces often enough during a downhill trek. Oh well, maybe someday I'll learn...