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
Alexis Paccard Alexis Paccard Alexis Paccard (12 June 1813 – 18 August 1867) was a French architect. Paccard entered the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1830 in the workshops of Louis-Hippolyte Lebas and Jean-Nicolas Huyot. He won the Second Grand Prix in 1835 for a medical school, and won the Prix de Rome in 1841 for a "Palace of an ambassador in a foreign country." His work includes a study of the Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens, which also earned him a medal at the Universal Exhibition of 1855. On his return he became official inspector and architect