Jacques Balmat for gold in the Sixt valley in 1834. Jacques Balmat Jacques Balmat, called "le Mont Blanc" (1762–1834) was a mountaineer, a Savoyard mountain guide, born in the Chamonix valley in Savoy, at this time part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. A chamois hunter and collector of crystals, Balmat completed the first ascent of Mont Blanc with physician Michel-Gabriel Paccard on 8 August 1786. For this feat, King Victor Amadeus III gave him the honorary title "le Mont Blanc". Balmat and Paccard's ascent of Mont Blanc was a major accomplishment in the early history of mountaineering. C. Douglas Milner wrote "The
South Summit (Mount Everest) ... none of us had been prepared for any spectacle quite so sharp, quite so beautiful as this. To me it seemed that a new and unsuspected peak of alpine stature stood above the South Col." A geologist with a 1965 Indian Everest expedition discovered a deposit of fossils of seashells in limestone about 100 feet above the South Summit. This expedition put nine climbers on the main summit. Describing his first ascent of Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen in 1978, Reinhold Messner described the South Summit as "quite a milestone for me". During the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, mountain