Trekking Poles are Boss!

The nerdiest peace of hiking equipment, by far, has to be the Pole. You know the ones, the thin aluminum or, gasp, carbon fiber tubes that resemble nothing more than the ski pole industry's lame and transparent attempt to boos market share and Sewell more crap that people don't need in the "off season" instead of focusing their attention on Mountain Biking, like the ski areas do. Anyway, I guess these things came out in the 80s when every one was too coked out to stand any way, but had LOTS of energy for hiking and stuff. To the people who had money to waste on things like cocaine and summer time ski poles, "Tercking" Poles must have sounded like a fantastic idea. I did most of my hiking back in the 80s with a machine gun in my hands, so they seamed a little gay to me. Of course, I don't mean to insinuate that all Gay people use Trekking poles or that the use of said poles, by default, makes one Gay. Sexual orientation had little, or even nothing, to do with the possession or use of ski poles in the summer time thus the small "g" in gay. 

They do, however, make you a complete and total nerd. They were never cool and were certainly never "combat" so I never even considered them for use. Then, last fathers day my daughter got me a set of cheep, WartMart poles. Honestly, I didn't know what to make of them. I stared at them for a long time. I spent several minuets extending and collapsing them. I pushed the little spring thingies on the bottom. "these thing are SO gay", thought I to myself, and into the closet they went (pun intended). 

Well, the other day was their Coming Out Party. I' m not sure what it was that possessed me to actually try these things out. I am quite sure that it was NOT the YouTube video of the hot blond chick showing us all how to look bigger than a bear by waving ski poles in the air to frighten one off. I think mostly I wanted the satisfaction of knowing how the pole mounts on my backpack worked. For whatever the reason, I dug them out, figured out how to adjust them and dragged them out into the woods.

Now, it's time for me to tell you a secrete. THEASE THINGS ARE FREAKIN' AWSOME!!!! You simply MUST try some, if you have the means. Of course, the cheepo ones, like I have only cost twenty bucks of so. You can't even get a descent snoot-full of blow for that kind of money these days. 

Seriously, they really work as advertised. If you ski at all, as opposed to snowboarding, you will take naturally to the swinging of the poles. They provide that all important Third Point of Contact that really, really, really helps your stability on uneven ground. You can use them to test the firmness of muddy spots and as plows to move pricer bushed out of the way that have overgrown the rail. Most importantly for me, they give my front paws something to DO while hiking other than flopping around at my sides. hiking Poles, while they might still be a gimmick, are not really all that nerdy and are defiantly NOT gay.