First Ascent of Mont Blanc

On 8 August 1786, two men from the Chamonix valley, the crystal hunter Jacques Balmat and the local doctor Michel-Gabriel Paccard, reached the summit of Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps at roughly 4,800 meters. It was the first recorded ascent of the mountain, and it is widely treated as the beginning of mountaineering as a pursuit in its own right: a climb undertaken for its challenge and for scientific curiosity rather than for hunting, trade, or religious purposes.

Before then, the high glaciers were regarded by most people as a forbidding and dangerous wasteland. Chamonix had drawn a growing number of travelers from the 1740s onward, as visitors from Britain and elsewhere came to see the glaciers, and the Genevan naturalist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure became fascinated by the massif. In the 1760s he offered a reward to anyone who could find a practicable route to the summit. Several attempts failed, defeated by crevasses, cold, and the thin air at altitude, which was poorly understood at the time.

Paccard and Balmat made their climb without modern equipment, wearing ordinary clothing and using wooden poles and hobnailed boots. Balmat had explored parts of the upper mountain while searching for crystals and had reached a high point on an earlier attempt, and he and Paccard set out together to follow a route over the glaciers and the exposed upper slopes. They reached the top in the evening after a long, exhausting day, and descended safely. Accounts of the climb differ in detail, since the main witnesses had reasons to shape their stories.

Those reasons became a controversy. Balmat later collaborated with the writer Alexandre Dumas, whose retelling cast him as the hero and Paccard as a reluctant, even dependent companion. Balmat also claimed the reward from Saussure. For a long time Paccard's role was underplayed, though modern historians, drawing on his own account and contemporary records, generally credit him as a full partner and the originator of the expedition.

The consequences were considerable. In 1787 Saussure himself climbed Mont Blanc with Balmat and a large party, taking scientific measurements. Over the following decades more climbers followed, and by the mid-nineteenth century the Alps entered what is often called the golden age of alpinism, when most major peaks were first climbed. The 1786 ascent showed that the high mountains could be reached, and it opened a new relationship between Europeans and the landscapes they had long feared.