Mont Blanc and snowboarding. The three towns and their communes which surround Mont Blanc are Courmayeur in Aosta Valley, Italy; and Saint-Gervais-les-Bains and Chamonix in Haute-Savoie, France. The latter town was the site of the first Winter Olympics. A cable car ascends and crosses the mountain range from Courmayeur to Chamonix, through the Col du Géant. The 11 km (7¼-mile) Mont Blanc Tunnel, constructed between 1957 and 1965, runs beneath the mountain and is a major trans-Alpine transport route. The first recorded ascent of Mont Blanc was on 8 August 1786 by Jacques Balmat and the doctor Michel Paccard. This climb, initiated
Fonderie Paccard Fonderie Paccard Fonderie Paccard is a French foundry in Annecy. Founded in 1796, the foundry has cast more than 120,000 bells located throughout the world. The foundry has been continuously operated by seven generations of the Paccard family. The largest bell cast by Paccard is the World Peace Bell. Paccard is best known in the United States for its participation in the Liberty Bell Savings Bond Project. As part of the Marshall Plan, the foundry cast 57 replicas of the Liberty Bell in 1950 and 1951. Most of the bells were distributed, one each, to the then-48 U.S. states as