The Perroud name has belonged to the valley of Chamonix since the sixteenth century, when the first families cleared the slopes beneath the Mont-Blanc for pasture and rye. Life followed the seasons: cattle driven to the high alps in June, hay brought down before the first snows, long winters spent by the stove.
When travellers began arriving to see the glaciers, the mountain became a livelihood of a different kind. Sons of the family carried ropes and lanterns as porters and guides, and the summit that had once been a distant presence above the fields became a place to be climbed, mapped and loved.
The railway reached the valley in 1901, and with it a new century. The electric line from Le Fayet brought engineers, schoolteachers and ideas; the generations that followed left for the polytechnic schools and universities of Lyon, Grenoble, Paris and Lausanne, and built careers in engineering and higher education.
Yet each of them came back. Skis were waxed in the same cellar for a hundred years, and every winter the family returns to the slopes, to the light on the Aiguilles, and to the mountain that first gave them a name.
