From at least the 11th century, organized brotherhoods of marrons guided travelers over the Great St Bernard and Mont Cenis passes, breaking trail through snow, carrying passengers' baggage and running sledge descents on the Italian side. Napoleon's carriage road over Mont Cenis, finished around 1810, and the railways and tunnels that followed erased the trade within two generations.
Marron (Alpine pass guide) no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
c. 1000 – 1786
Pass guides, hunters and crystal seekers
For centuries the Alps were something to get across, not up. Professional pass guides shepherded pilgrims and merchants over the great cols, while in the high valleys chamois hunters and crystal seekers built the practical glacier craft — reading snow bridges, cutting steps, judging weather — that guiding would later be made from. The summits themselves were considered useless and widely believed cursed; nobody paid to stand on one.
What else was happening then
1786
Mont Blanc falls to a crystal hunter and a doctor
On 8 August 1786, crystal hunter Jacques Balmat and village physician Michel-Gabriel Paccard reached the roughly 4,806 m summit of Mont Blanc, watched through telescopes from Chamonix, claiming the prize de Saussure had offered in 1760. The ascent created a trade: the following year de Saussure himself was led up by Balmat with a team of local guides and porters.
1821
The world's first guides' company
After an avalanche on Mont Blanc killed three Chamonix guides on the scientific Hamel expedition of 1820, the valley founded the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix — the world's first professional guides' association, with fixed tariffs, a rotation system for sharing work, and a relief fund for the widows and children of guides killed on duty.
Where that work lives now
The certified professional who leads strangers up — and above all back down — the world's great mountains, a trade Chamonix organized in 1821.
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