On New Years day we loaded up the kids and headed up US Highway 50 toward Lake Tahoe for some hiking in the snow. Our kids were anxious to test out their new snowshoes and Echo Lake provided the perfect environment.
We spent the day at the local snow-park and our four year old was able to use her new Atlas Junior snowshoe on packed snow, deep powder, and some heavy "sierra cement" that was chopped up by other hikers. Her total time in the shoes was about five hours.
Specifications:
The Atlas Juniors (priced at about $50) are about 18 inches long and can support a child up to 80 lbs.
Suspension
After only a couple of minutes of instruction, our four year old was up and running. The aluminum frames seemed light enough for her to lift her feet completely out of the powder. The fixed suspension design also helped with the simplicity. We did test these on a hill and the fixed suspension didn't slow her down at all. For kids, I recommend sticking with this simple design and avoiding the toe-hinge common with adult shoes.
Buckles
The one complaint that I had was that these snowshoes do not have the ratcheting buckles that you can find on some of the other Atlas designs. The Junior does have a plastic clip-buckle, but near the end of the day we found the nylon strap to be slipping (possibly due to moisture). It only took a moment to fix the problem, but I was surprised that Atlas didn't incorporate some of the buckle technology they have developed on the adult shoes that doesn't slip or require you to take your gloves off to adjust.
Footbed
Although she only has a range of about 200 feet, we also purchased a pair of Juniors for our two year old. We expected these to be big on her and were suprised that the adjustable foodbed was actually able to contract to the size of her (very small) foot. She had a little more trouble with maneuvering in the snow, but we attribute that to operator issues and not snowshoe design issues.
All in all, the Atlas Junior is a good product and we would recommend them to any family looking to outfit little feet for snow.