Mont Blanc Was First Summited
On this day · 8 August 1786
In 1786 two Chamonix men cracked the Alps' highest peak, lighting the spark that would ignite modern mountaineering.
On 8 August 1786, two men from the village of Chamonix stood atop Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps at roughly 4,808 metres (15,771 feet). They were Michel-Gabriel Paccard, a local doctor, and Jacques Balmat, a crystal hunter who served as his porter. Carrying no rope and no ice axe, they reached the summit in the early evening, where Paccard hurriedly recorded barometric pressure and temperature before the pair turned back down.
The climb answered a challenge set decades earlier. In 1760 the Swiss naturalist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure had offered a reward to the first person to conquer the mountain, and Balmat duly collected it.
Their ascent broke a barrier that had long guarded the world of high snow.
The achievement is widely treated as the birth of alpinism. Yet it was quickly clouded by controversy: a rival promoter, Marc-Théodore Bourrit, spread accounts that minimised Paccard’s role, distorting the record for generations until historians restored the doctor’s credit.
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