Blue Ice is a climbing gear brand founded in Chamonix, France, in 2008. Its North American headquarters is in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Blue Ice, a French brand with its North American office in Salt Lake City, sells a mountaineering harness that weighs 84 grams in a size small. Its first Choucas, in 2011, was billed by the company as the first mountaineering harness under 150 grams. Of the years before that, the brand's own history page admits, "We didn't know where we were going yet." It is a brave sentence for a mountaineering company to publish.
Giovanni Rossi started Blue Ice in 2008 in a garage in the Chamonix region, with friends who climbed. Professional mountain guides helped shape its Warthog and Dragonfly packs. Hardware and harnesses are made in France. The packs come from Vietnam.
The Salt Lake City office opened in 2017, and trade coverage at the time said several former Black Diamond employees were developing the brand's hard goods. Blue Ice is still independent, owned through a Geneva firm with Rossi on its board. It guarantees every product for its lifespan. Blue Ice says its backyard is where it field tests, and for the Salt Lake office that backyard is the Wasatch.
Blue Ice built its Les Houches headquarters in 2016 at the foot of Mont Blanc to meet thermal environmental regulations that had not yet taken effect.
