Invitation to Simond's House

For its professional visitors and the general public, Simond is launching “Héritage” in 2021, a museum space that tells its story through the history of mountaineering. Or perhaps the other way around… It’s hard to tell, so closely intertwined are the two.

Over 160 years, always on the move

Long before mountaineering became a codified discipline, Simond was already designing the tools to reach the heights. Ice axes, crampons, and carabiners stamped with the eagle—it was with these that the pioneers blazed trails, took risks, and wrote the great alpine epic. Founded in the Valley in 1860, the company grew in step with the ascents on the massif (and far beyond), driven by generations of blacksmiths, artisans, and enthusiasts of the vertical.

Having moved from Les Houches to the outskirts of Cham’ in 2020, its base camp is neither a sterile factory nor a marketed showroom. It’s a hybrid space where design, innovation, testing, and production coexist under one roof. We design, we build, we test. And we (deliberately) put every product through its paces before sending it off to the mountains.

At the heart of the site, an impressive drop tower serves as a crucial testing ground for prototypes and rope-based products. When you consider that someone’s life can hang on a single carabiner, nothing is left to chance. Add a climbing wall and a bouldering area—essential for developing climbing shoes—and, incidentally, a place for the teams to blow off steam. At Simond, the playground begins at the bottom of the valley.

Visit the Heritage Space

No dusty nostalgia here, but a memory very much alive. Ice axes weathered by time, battered crampons, personal stories, archival photos… Every object on display has seen the mountain up close. Very close. Yet half the items aren’t behind glass. Here, you touch, you weigh, you understand. And you realize that before ice axes, people tackled Mont Blanc with a stick and a ladder.

The project’s origins read almost like an adventure novel. While searching for antique ice axes to add to the museum’s collection, Denis Pivot stumbled upon the walking stick of Jacques Balmat, the hero of the first ascent of Mont Blanc in 1786. The object had been lying dormant where Adolphe Simond had learned the blacksmith’s trade, at the Devouassoud family home. The staff—damaged but intact in the story it tells—is now preserved at the Mont Blanc Museum in Chamonix. The circle is complete.

The exhibition design also plays with symbols: a tunnel of ice axe blades traces their evolution, a palisade of wooden skis structures the space, and ropes wind and intertwine throughout the exhibition. They connect eras, uses, and gestures. Above all, they remind us that everything is a matter of connections.

150, route des Papillons - Chamonix-Mont-Blanc