Michel-Gabriel Paccard Michel-Gabriel Paccard Michel Gabriel Paccard (1757–1827) was a Savoyard doctor and alpinist, citizen of the Kingdom of Sardinia. Born in Chamonix, he studied medicine in Turin. Due to his passion for botany and minerals, he met Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, who initiated the race to be the first to ascend Mont Blanc. Gaston Rébuffat wrote "Like Saussure a devotee of the natural sciences, he has a dream: to carry a barometer to the summit and take a reading there. An excellent mountaineer, he has already made several attempts." Paccard had a first, unsuccessful, attempt in 1783 with Marc Theodore Bourrit. In
Highest unclimbed mountain before been explored, especially since some high peaks in the Greater Ranges are so remote that they were unknown to local inhabitants when first sighted by European explorers. The world's third tallest peak, Kangchenjunga, has been summited a number of times, but after the first climbers of the peak agreed to honor the wishes of locals and not set foot on the topmost part of the mountain, succeeding mountaineering parties may have followed this tradition. Similarly, Nanda Devi has also been climbed but the topmost summit was not ascended and the primary summit is now off limits to climbers. Machapuchare