If you’ve been hanging around WOC for a while, you’ll know that one of my hobbies is making hiking sticks (“staves” to be proper, I guess). I make them from several tree species: maple, oak, hickory, white cedar, white pine, alder, aspen, and ash. Ash and hickory are favorites to make out of freshly cut saplings, in part because in the spring it’s a breeze to strip the bark from them—which is really just for aesthetics, not for any structural purpose. In fact, leaving the bark on makes them a bit stronger. Yet ash and hickory are still tough, stripped or not.
