Mark the Mountain Guide author, Mark Seaton, is a British mountain guide who lives with his wife and children in the Chamonix valley. He guides climbers and skiers in the French, Swiss and Italian Alps. Seaton's accomplishments as a professional mountain guide include the first complete unassisted British guided ascent of the Eiger Nordwand with his client Charles Sherwood in 2007. In 2008, Seaton & Sherwood teamed up again to complete a traverse of Mont Blanc via an ascent of Aiguille Blanche de Peuterey, the most difficult 4000-m summit in the Alps. In 1996, Mark led Don Planner, the first blind man to climb
Alexis Paccard Alexis Paccard Alexis Paccard (12 June 1813 – 18 August 1867) was a French architect. Paccard entered the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1830 in the workshops of Louis-Hippolyte Lebas and Jean-Nicolas Huyot. He won the Second Grand Prix in 1835 for a medical school, and won the Prix de Rome in 1841 for a "Palace of an ambassador in a foreign country." His work includes a study of the Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens, which also earned him a medal at the Universal Exhibition of 1855. On his return he became official inspector and architect