I've always said "staves".

A good staff does the job you need it to do. What are your priorities?

Many people here have commented that they like the high-tech sort of ski pole like walking sticks. Myself, I have a pair of three-section Komperdell poles (rebranded by EMS) that I use for skiing only, mainly because I switch off between Salomon 1080 skis and Line Jedi 89 skiboards, so if I don't want to use the poles for awhile, they can be collapsed and strapped to my backpack.

I would never use these things as general hiking sticks, or even worse "survival sticks". They're just not sturdy enough to do anything other than what they were specifically designed to do, and I'd rather have something a bit more versatile, sturdier, and more reliable than multi-section aluminum sticks with lots of parts.

Around town, I use a Cold Steel City Stick. Nice thick fiberglass stick with a pretty polished stainless steel head. It only lacks two things. One is a proper tip, solved by sticking a standard black crutch tip on the end, available at any pharmacist. The other is something to hold it up when you need your hands free. I need to put some nice cord around it for that, because I keep dropping it and nicking up the head. Now I know why so many canes and umbrellas have a crook! I think I want to get another one and paint it brown for vanity's sake.

My favorite stick these days is a Red Oak stick that I hand carved (well, whittled, really) out of a spacer from a stack of lumber from back in the days when I used to work at a lumber yard. Just the other day, I gave it a nice coat of beeswax polish. It's about the length of a Jo staff (4.5 feet or so), and about 1-1/8 inch thick. Someday, I will replace it with a prettier version with nice shod ends. I think I'd like Japanese White Oak (shirakashi), like my favorite drum sticks from Pro-Mark.

The Crawford Survival Staff looks neat, too, if a bit pricey!