The Walking Stick: How my fellow hikers made my favorite trail even better

The trail I like to hike most these days is a split personality. First, she’s sweet as pie, all downhill under the soaring pines with tantalizing peeks of fog-draped mountains in the background.

But once you reach your prize at the bottom, a river so wide and strong that it sounds like the ocean, the trail flips a switch, making you now pay for all her sweetness with a non-stop climb back up.

Yet these contrasts just make me love that trail more; her volatility making each visit so exciting that I come back for the views again and again, knowing I will also have to brave the climb up again and again. Even when the weather turned cold, and the path down to the river turned slick with ice and rain, it was just another challenge that made the reward even sweeter.

Then one morning at the top of the hill, I found something that made me love that trail even more: A fellow hiker had gathered about a dozen walking sticks and put them at the top of the hill for anyone to use.*

That was cool.

Because not only did using one of those sticks help me navigate the trail when it was extra treacherous, I found I liked walking with a stick so much that I now use one every time I hike that trail, choosing a very tall, sturdy one that makes me feel like Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings as my new hiking companion. It aids me physically, helping me keep my balance and stay upright, but also psychologically, especially on those days when I start to feel unsafe.

“That’s a good stick for the critters!” said one woman as we stopped and chatted. 

“Yes,” I said, thinking but not saying that I was far more worried about people, picturing the stick as a good way to clock someone over the head if they needed it. No one has needed the stick so far, but on at least two occasions my fellow hikers there have made me very uneasy.

Because what used to make me feel safe on hiking trails, the dog, can’t join me on hikes like these anymore, having become too old to climb that hill with me. So now I depend on the stick to give me courage and make me feel less alone.

That is very cool.

See the trail and walking stick here:

*3/34/2025: More proof of the kindness of hikers was provided on this trail just last week, when one of the regulars dropped his phone at the bottom and when he came back to look for it, someone had picked it up and put it at the top for him to find: On a rock near the parking lot where he was sure to see it, and did!