I was 21 and taking time off from college to through-hike the Appalachian Trail when I discovered trekking poles. My local gear pusher at the time—a former through-hiker himself—said poles saved his ass, and knees, when he walked from Georgia to Maine. Still, I balked at spending over a hundred bucks on glorified walking sticks. I was the guy who'd always hiked with the knobby pine limb. But he was persistent, and I finally relented. Thank God for that. If I hadn't, I'd be in a wheelchair right now, covered with splinters.

Still, I started out with bottom-of-the-barrel poles. My self-assured logic: "sticks are sticks." They felt fine, and were made of aluminum. Good enough, I thought. Nope. Like many other things (girlfriends, muscle mass, hygiene, professional ambition) they fell victim to the trail, lasting just two months and 900 miles. The Dragon's Tooth, an unusually jagged section of the AT in Virginia, snapped one in half like a toothpick.

After a few weeks of uncomfortable, pole-less walking, I got the pair that had originally been recommended to me: Leki's Super Makalu. They cost almost twice as much as my cheap sticks, but four out of five through-hikers had them for a reason: they don't break. Still, their locking mechanism—you twist to extend and contract their length—wasn't ideal. It was tedious to use (you can twist them too tightly, which gets them stuck in place, or not enough, which makes them unstable), and it slowly wore away. By the end of the hike the poles, though intact, weren't quite holding up. Neither was I, of course.

So, among other things, I learned from my walk that sticks are not just sticks. Any serious hiker who values his knees, hands, and the contents of his hemp wallet should buy Black Diamond's Terra CF trekking poles.

In lieu of another 2,000-mile journey by foot, I tested mine on a weekend hike in the Santa Fe National Forest. My goal was to condense the wear and tear of a five-month hike into a day's walk. The trail I chose was only 12 miles long, but the Terra CF's felt every rock-covered inch of it. I slammed them into boulders at awkward angles, thrust them into mud at high speeds, and generally beat the hell out of them as I made my way up and down 12,622-foot Mount Baldy. What amazed me more than their lightness (ten ounces a piece), or their flick-lock binary technology (which makes them superior to Leki's twist-locking poles), or even their grippy Short Flex tips, was their stability under extreme duress. These things took a beating like a young Muhammad Ali against the ropes, and, like Ali, came out on top. I got back to my car sorer from the unnecessary flailing and smashing than the hike itself. Just call Blackburn's Terra CF's The Greatest. I do. $125; www.blackdiamondequipment.com

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