The first ascent of Mont Blanc

Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat · 1786 CE · Earth

The first ascent of Mont Blanc — Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat · 1786 CE · Earth — Recorded expedition route · schematic map

Reach the summit of the highest mountain in the Alps, carry a barometer to the top and take a reading there.

Historical context

In 1760 the Geneva naturalist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure offered a reward to whoever found a way to the top of Mont Blanc, and for a quarter of a century nobody collected it; the guides' attempts turned back, and the people of Chamonix believed, Saussure wrote, that sleep at those heights would be fatal. A Chamonix doctor, Michel-Gabriel Paccard, studied the routes for years, and a crystal hunter, Jacques Balmat, survived a night on the snow in June 1786. On 7 and 8 August 1786 the two went up together, without rope or ice axe, and modern mountaineering is usually dated from their evening on the summit.

The voyage, step by step

  1. Leaving Chamonix

    7 August 1786

    Soon after midday on 7 August 1786, by the diary of a traveller who watched them, the Chamonix doctor Michel-Gabriel Paccard and the crystal hunter Jacques Balmat leave the village. They take a blanket, food and Paccard's instruments: a barometer on its tripod, a thermometer and a compass. They carry no rope and no ice axe, only long iron-tipped poles.

  2. A night at the top of the Côte

    7 August 1786

    They climb the Montagne de la Côte, the rocky spur between the Bossons and Taconnaz glaciers, and spend the night in a shelter at its top, the bivouac the guides had used before them; the place was later called the gîte à Balmat. They are away at four in the morning, by Paccard's account to Saussure.

  3. The Jonction and the Grands Mulets

    8 August 1786

    From the bivouac they cross the Bossons glacier towards the dark rocks of the Grands Mulets, through the Jonction, where it meets the Taconnaz glacier in a maze of crevasses. Four times a bridge of snow gives way under them. It is midday, by Paccard's account, before they are past the rocks.

  4. The Grand Plateau

    8 August 1786

    Towards three in the afternoon, in Stevens's reconstruction of Paccard's narrative, they reach the Grand Plateau, the wide snow basin under the summit at nearly four thousand metres. From there Paccard turns left, up a steep bank of snow between two bare walls of rock, the Rochers Rouges, rather than towards the ridge the guides had judged impossible in June.

  5. The summit at 6:23

    8 August 1786

    At 6:23 in the evening of 8 August 1786, Chamonix time by the watches of the travellers following them through telescopes, the two men reach the summit of Mont Blanc, the highest point of the Alps. Paccard plants his barometer in the snow and reads it, with his thermometer, before the sun goes down.

  6. Down by moonlight

    8 August 1786

    They leave the summit at 6:57 and run down to the rocks below it. Night overtakes them beyond the Grand Plateau, and a bright moon lights the crevasses. A little before midnight they are off the glacier, back at their shelter on the Montagne de la Côte. At dawn on 9 August Paccard, struck by snow blindness, can hardly see, and Balmat leads him by the hand down to the village.

  7. The witnesses and the reward

    9 August 1786

    On 9 August, at the request of Paccard's father, the valley's notary, Gersdorf and Meyer sign a certificate that they saw the doctor reach the summit with Jacques Balmat. On 13 August Balmat is in Geneva to claim the reward Saussure had offered since 1760, and on 3 August 1787 he guides Saussure himself to the summit, with a servant and eighteen guides.

  8. The quarrel begins

    1786 CE

    Marc-Théodore Bourrit, the Geneva painter and writer who had failed on the mountain himself, dates a pamphlet on 20 September 1786 that makes Balmat the finder of the route and the hero of the climb, and the doctor a passenger he had to fetch to the top. Paccard's own narrative is never printed, and the argument over who led outlives them both.

Outcome

The summit at 6:23 in the evening of 8 August 1786, Chamonix time by the watches of the travellers who watched through telescopes, after a night on the Montagne de la Côte; the reward collected, Paccard snow-blind, and a quarrel over the leadership that lasted two centuries.

Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat

A village doctor and a crystal hunter from Chamonix who walked up Mont Blanc together on 8 August 1786, without rope or ice axe, and whose quarrel over which of them had led outlived them both.

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Sources

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