A Naif in the Forest by Darrell Berger

Wing Tips to Hiking Boots: Musings of a New, Full-Time Poconos Resident

Our driveway twists and turns with gullies on both sides and not enough room at the top. Everybody hates it. I knew that in order to take our trash and recycling containers to the curb with freezing ice everywhere, I should attach crampons to my boots for the first time this year.

I am grateful for crampons. Who invented such a useful addition to footwear? Prehistoric ice trekkers attached pointy things to the bottom of their feet. Celts used iron spikes over three thousand years ago. My little rubber attachments date to the early twentieth century.

Oscar Eckenstein was the Lebron James of mountain climbing when his group attempted to ascend K2, the second highest mountain in the world, located on what is now the border between China and Pakistan, in 1902. He might have succeeded were Aleister Crowley not part of his crew. Crowley was an expert mountaineer, eccentric and self-promoter. An experienced practitioner of the occult, he was an early adapter to psychedelic drugs, cult leader and writer. His image is among the many on the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s.” He fell ill with a variety of ailments from malaria to snow blindness while ascending K2. He also complicated the expedition by insisting on taking several dozen volumes of poetry.

Eckenstein decided he needed two things to have succeeded: to have left Crowley in England and better traction. The latter he attained by inventing the crampon in 1908. It was forged from iron but comparatively sleek, making it much lighter and more useful than previous devices. Its name comes from a symbol in German heraldry, a long “z” figure with a slash through it that resembles Eckenstein’s design. He showed his invention to Henry Grivel, whose family had been blacksmiths in the Italian Alps for centuries. Grivel marketed the first ten-point crampon in 1910. My crampons are an updated version. The Grivel family still runs the Hotel Crampon in Courmayeur, Italy.

I walked down the icy driveway with no fear of slipping, sliding or Aleister Crowley. Well, maybe a little fear of Crowley.