alpenstock

Says the caption, “They wear hats, bloomers, hiking boots and gauntlet gloves, and hold alpenstocks.”

Brooks himself reads as the opposite of acrophobic: scaling the icy pinnacles of Hollywood without anything more than a pang of self-doubt, using humor as his alpenstock.

Following closely behind them perhaps there would have strode a professional pilgrim, supporting himself on a stout knobbed staff shod like an alpenstock and weighed down with blessed medals, relics, shells, vernicles and so forth.

But the rest shout “Excelsior,” take a firmer grasp of alpenstock, stamp feet more vehemently into the snow, and with dogged perseverance move step by step up the final height.

We are now preparing to go up the Rigi for the night, and the whole party are gone to purchase alpenstocks.