Tips For Walking Safely on Ice or Snow Without Falling

Maybe it was the wintry morning when I stepped out of the carpool van, hit an icy patch and went skidding on my backside toward the doors of my middle school as my classmates looked on. Or the day I stood on my front porch waving goodbye to a friend and watched in terror as she slid all the way down my frozen front steps.

At some point along the way, I became scared of slipping on ice. In the wintertime, I shuffle down the sidewalks of Boston an inch at a time, lest I go down like a cartoon character on a banana peel.

The reality, experts said, is that I should be concerned, at least a little. “Our brains are trained to be threat-identifying machines,” said Allison Logemann, a neuropsychologist with the University of Minnesota Medical School — and slick surfaces can be dangerous.

But there are ways to worry less when you’re out for a walk, and to lower the risk that you do lose your footing.

Brace yourself physically.

“Footwear is the first layer of the defense,” said Sophia Yue Li, a biomedical engineer who has studied how hundreds of types of winter boots fare on ice in her work at the KITE Research Institute at The University Health Network in Toronto.

To start, you need well-fitting shoes or boots with good traction. Dr. Li said her research suggests that some of the best boots for walking on ice are made of newer materials, like Arctic Grip or IceBite Grip, which use both rubber and hard particles like fiberglass to grip icy surfaces, even on a slope. Generally speaking, Dr. Li said, on slippery ice, the pattern of your shoe treads is less important than the material and how worn they are. If you’re not sure what shoes to wear, you can test various pairs in a safe spot, like an icy patch next to a fence you can hold onto for support.

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