Hiking Stick: A Memory of Wood

There are two kinds of hikers: those who use the
aid of a hiking stick, and those who fall down. Hiking
sticks are not affectations. They are, rather, tools that
help you cover more ground, reach to high places, serve as emergency replacements for tent poles, and a myriad other
uses. In addition, they can be turned into data bases that
help you recall all the trails you’ve hiked and the
sights you’ve seen.

When Friend Wife and I wrote Hiking Kentucky it was a first of its kind. There had been several pretty good Kentucky hiking books, to be sure. But they were all site specific; dealing with Red River Gorge; and the Big South Fork; and the surface trails of Mammoth Cave. Ours was the first to detail many of Kentucky’s great trails (a hundred of them, in fact) statewide.

One result was a lot of media coverage, including segments on the local TV stations. When Channel 36 came out to do some filming the videographer fell in love with Barbara’s hiking stick. I mean to say he was fascinated, and spent nearly 20 minutes shooting it from all possible angles.

To us it was just a stick.

That hiking stick started life as a box elder sapling in New York’s Adirondack mountains. I cut it to length for her, peeled off the bark, and added a leather wrist loop at the top and a rubber crutch tip at the bottom. She used that bare stick to hike the Van Hoevenburg Trail, on the backside of the Olympic Bobsled run, in Lake Placid.

By the time she retired that particular hiking staff it was covered with the names of trails. Van Hoevenburg in the Adirondacks. Zeeland, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Hart Lake in Montana’s East Pioneers. Chimney Arch right here in the Bluegrass.

It’s an old habit I’d acquired while in the Scouts. With a woodburner I write the name of each trail it has helped us hike right on the hiking stick. What a memory booster! Better, even, then a photo. Trail names in the Daniel Boone National Forest. Trails in Great Smoky Mountains NP. Trails along the Blue Ridge, and on Lookout Mountain and in the Ozarks. Our hiking staffs are festooned with the names of trails we’ve hiked. All either of us has to do is read the trail name and the whole hike is recalled.

Shall I tell you about the black bear who couldn’t decide whose trail it was, in North Carolina? Or the time we met the young lady at Diana’s Bath, getting ready to hike in Tibet, but who’d brought no water for her five-mile practice trek? Or the hiking club from Tennessee we’d met on the Blue Heron Loop? Seven hikers in that group, five of whom were carrying GPS units, but nary a topo map nor compass among them.

I don’t have to check my notes. Or look at a picture. I read my hiking stick and all the scenic climaxes come back. The panoramic display from Auxier Ridge in Red River Gorge. The steam rising from hot springs of a Montana morning. The drop-dead view of 16 of the Adirondack high peaks laid out in a semi-circle while we munched fresh-picked blueberries.

It’s no wonder the 36 cameraman was so impressed.

I had reason to think of this the other day. Now that winter is here, hikers and backpackers are getting ready. They’re getting in shape, and checking their gear, and buying new stuff that strikes their fancy.

The hiking stick comes in and out of fashion. Me, I’ve never given hiking staffs up. They turn you from an insecure biped to a very stable triped. They help you reach when you have to. They stand-in for that broken tent pole. Your hiking stick is a monopod for steadying a camera or pair of binoculars. It gives you a boost when you need that last bit of oomph to make it up that boulder. In short, indispensable.

Not everyone agrees, of course. And hikers’ views are often formulated by what the literature says, and what the clerks in the outfitting shops are pushing.

Right now, hiking sticks are in. More than in, you’re considered undressed if you don’t have a pair of them, pushing you along the trails.

Many of them are really high-tech, using ski-pole technology to create lightweight, telescoping poles, ergonomically designed grips, and interchangeable tips for changing terrain. Everything but a turbocharger!

The really in thing is to use a pair of them, pushing yourself along as if you were cross-country skiing. Don’t laugh. It actually is effective. Initially it takes some practice, coordinating your strides with the swing of the pole. But once you get the hang of it, you actually can cover more ground, with less effort. For a really dramatic improvement, try combining a pair of these poles with snowshoes. It almost takes the pain out.

That’s the upside. The downside is that they lack any semblance of warmth. Wood is a living thing. There’s a spirit in a wooden hiking stick that promotes in me a sense of confidence and trust. Intellectually I know that the high-tech staff is stronger, and more likely to do its job. But down in my guts I don’t really believe it.

There are other factors at play, too. It’s almost axiomatic that hikers and backpackers are part of the “green” revolution. While others play at being earth-friendly, trekkers live it. Somehow, a metal or space-age-plastic staff flies in the face of that philosophy. A wood staff starts life being harvested from a renewable resource, and ends it as biodegraded compost.

If you should lose one of those high-tech staffs you’ll be moaning about it for two days longer than forever. For all their advantages, they don’t come cheap, and losing one can represent serious cash. Lose a wooden hiking stick, and, so what? It’s just a stick. The woods are full of them.

And, the fact remains, that short of an oxy torch, you aren’t going to engrave memories into one of those high-tech poles.