About using gloves when hiking on trails where you need trekking poles

I strongly recommend the gloves. Apparently if you use trekking poles, with each step you could have more than ten pounds of force pounding your hands. Over the course of miles, that translates into tons of force, hence blisters if you don't wear gloves. When I went backpacking in February for 4 days and 3 nights, I used trekking poles, and at the end of every day, I found that I had added one more bloodblister on another finger. Apparently by putting force on my hands to use trekking poles to stabilize me, over several days the pounding that the handle put on my fingers caused the blisters. But when I went backpacking in early April, I wore thin leather gloves to protect my fingers, and my hands were protected after a couple of days backpacking.

• Return to home page