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
Jacques de Morgan Europe and Greece, it still retains the traces of those civilizations that were the cradle of our own." In 1887-89 he unearthed 576 graves around Alaverdi and Akhatala, near the Tiflis-Alexandropol railway line. His father Eugène, also called "Baron" de Morgan, was an engineer in mineral findings. His interests were in entomology and prehistory. He named his two sons, Henry and Jacques. His sons later got into fieldwork, excavating the Campigny faults near Rouen with him, which had lent its name to the first phase of the European Neolithic. With his father Jacques became acquainted with Gabriel de Mortillet, who