Mark the Mountain Guide author, Mark Seaton, is a British mountain guide who lives with his wife and children in the Chamonix valley. He guides climbers and skiers in the French, Swiss and Italian Alps. Seaton's accomplishments as a professional mountain guide include the first complete unassisted British guided ascent of the Eiger Nordwand with his client Charles Sherwood in 2007. In 2008, Seaton & Sherwood teamed up again to complete a traverse of Mont Blanc via an ascent of Aiguille Blanche de Peuterey, the most difficult 4000-m summit in the Alps. In 1996, Mark led Don Planner, the first blind man to climb
Jacques Gabriel Jacques Gabriel Jacques Gabriel (1667–1742) was a French architect, the father of the famous Ange-Jacques Gabriel. His mother was a cousin of Jules Hardouin-Mansart and his father, another Jacques Gabriel was a masonry contractor for the "Bâtiments du Roi", the French royal works, and the designer of the Château de Choisy for the king's cousin, La Grande Mademoiselle. The younger Jacques Gabriel was appointed one of the "controlleurs généraux" at the "Bâtiments du Roi" in 1688, at the age of twenty-one. Two years later he was sent to accompany Robert de Cotte on an eighteen-month sojourn in Italy, sharpening his