Mont Blanc

The siege of Mont Blanc was opened in 1760 when the Geneva naturalist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, then twenty years old, walked up to Chamonix and offered a reward to anyone who could find a way to the summit. The prize stood for twenty-six years. On 8 August 1786 the Chamonix doctor Michel-Gabriel Paccard and the crystal-hunter Jacques Balmat reached the top by the Grands Mulets and the Dôme du Goûter, climbing through the night and topping out in the late afternoon. Saussure himself, escorted by Balmat and eighteen porters, followed in August 1787 and spent four hours on the summit taking barometric and physiological measurements — a campaign of high-altitude science that is usually taken as the founding moment of alpinism. Marie Paradis, a Chamonix maid, became the first woman on top in 1808; Henriette d'Angeville, who climbed in 1838 with a near-military expedition of guides, was the first to do so on her own initiative.