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
Gabriel Jacques Surenne who also published books on French military subjects. Gabriel Jacques Surenne Gabriel Jacques Surenne FSA FASE (1777-1858) was a 19th-century French-born military historian living in Scotland who authored numerous publications in the fields of warfare and battle analysis and also in French grammar. He was born in Compiegne in France on 25 October 1777. His early life is unclear other than various references made by himself as to having been trained in Paris. A newspaper epitaph mentions his war service with Napoleon Bonaparte in his successful Italian Campaign. He appears in Edinburgh around 1830, both as a teacher and prodigious