In the first age of Alpine tourism, teams of porters carried wealthy visitors up viewpoint peaks like the Rigi in sedan chairs — Mark Twain still described the busy Rigi tourist machine in A Tramp Abroad in 1880. Europe's first mountain rack railway, opened up the Rigi from Vitznau in 1871, ended the trade almost overnight; the railways kept the tourists and dropped the porters.
Summit chair porter 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.
1854
The Wetterhorn opens the Golden Age
English judge Alfred Wills' ascent of the Wetterhorn above Grindelwald, guided by Auguste Balmat, is the conventional start of alpinism's Golden Age. Two young locals, Christian Almer and Ulrich Kaufmann, gate-crashed the climb carrying a young fir tree to plant on the summit; mistaken at first for rivals, they finished the climb with Wills' party. Guides then led first ascents of nearly every great Alpine peak within eleven years.
1865
Triumph and disaster on the Matterhorn
On 14 July 1865 Edward Whymper's party of seven made the first ascent of the Matterhorn, led on the mountain by Chamonix guide Michel Croz. On the descent the least experienced client slipped, the rope snapped, and Croz and three clients fell about 1,200 m to their deaths. The Zermatt inquiry cleared the survivors, and the disaster fixed the guide's dilemma — whose life answers for whose — in the public mind.
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.
🏔️ Mountain Guide →