Afternoon I do a lot of winter trail walking and use a mixture of yaktrak and microspikes.  Its a multitime a day walking the dog etc. The trails are dirt and gravel and some concrete underneath and the Trails around here ice up pretty quick. As soon as snow is deep enough it's snowshoes but it's the low level stuff that's a pain. Just bust my second set of a particular brand and am wondering how others make out.

 

Looking for advice/experiences of others 

I've been very happy with my Hillsound Trail Crampons over the course of 3 or so years now. They've been seeing less use recently because my new snowshoes are so light and easy to get into and out of that I frequently skip the spikes and go straight to those. However for straight up ice and packed snow walking (like if I was hiking those trails in the Wasatch front this time of year), the Hillsounds would still get the nod.

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I'm on 5th winter and well over 2,000 trail running miles on my microspikes; I bought another set as a spare thinking these would eventually fail- that was two winters ago :)

I have sharpened them at the beginning of each winter- ~ 15 minutes with a flat file.

I'd be really hard pressed to think of a better substitute for icy trails or heavily packed snow.

Snow gets deep enough, I have several snowshoes in my quiver to choose from.