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.

Piled in a corner, his hiking gear—boots, alpenstock, leather knapsack.

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.