Early mountaineering: Mont Blanc to the Matterhorn.

Mont Blanc, 1786

ExplorersWeb (Jilli Cluff, 8 August 2021) gives the first ascent of Mont Blanc as 8 August 1786, by Michel-Gabriel Paccard, a doctor from Chamonix, and Jacques Balmat. It says the two set out from Chamonix on 7 August and reached the top early in the evening of the following day.

The climb answered a challenge. ExplorersWeb says the Geneva scientist Horace-Benedict de Saussure had offered a reward for the first ascent, after failing on the mountain himself in 1760. Wikipedia adds that the reward had stood for about 25 years, that Balmat collected it, and that King Victor Amadeus III gave him the honorary title "du Mont Blanc". According to Wikipedia, de Saussure reached the summit himself on 3 August 1787, with Balmat and a large party of about 17 others.

The 1786 ascent is often called the start of modern alpinism. That is a common way of describing it in ExplorersWeb and Wikipedia, not a ruling by any body.

Who gets the credit

The credit for the climb has been disputed, and later writers have taken sides.

• Balmat's version. Balmat's own account played down Paccard's part in the climb, according to Wikipedia.
• The critics. Wikipedia records C. Douglas Milner, writing in 1955, calling Balmat's story largely fictional, and Eric Shipton, in 1966, describing Balmat as enlarging his own role.
• Joint credit. ExplorersWeb (2021) credits both men together.
• Britannica. A search summary of Britannica's entry names Paccard as the climber, with Balmat as his porter, and says de Saussure's ascent the next year overshadowed Paccard's achievement. Britannica refused our request, so we could not confirm the wording.

The ascent also became the subject of a book. The American Alpine Journal's 1958 article on the Alpine Club's centenary lists "The First Ascent of Mont Blanc", by T. Graham Brown and Gavin de Beer, among the club's centenary publications.

The first women on Mont Blanc

Marie Paradis, a young woman from Chamonix (also written Maria), reached the summit in 1808. Wikipedia and other accounts seen in search summaries say her companions helped carry or drag her over the last stretch, and that her ascent was not formally recognised.

Henriette d'Angeville is usually credited as the first woman to climb Mont Blanc under her own power. The year of her climb is given two ways:

• 4 September 1838, according to a Wellcome Collection catalogue record (seen as a search summary) and Wikipedia.
• 1809, according to ExplorersWeb's 2021 anniversary article. Her birth year is given as 1794 or 1795, which would have made her a young child in 1809, so this looks like an error in that article. We give it as ExplorersWeb's claim against the other two sources.

More on women climbers is on women in climbing.

The Alpine Club, 1857

Wikipedia gives the founding of the Alpine Club as 22 December 1857 in London and says it is generally regarded as the world's first mountaineering club. Its account of the founders: William Mathews suggested a national mountaineering club in letters to F. J. A. Hort in February 1857, E. S. Kennedy chaired the first formal meeting, and John Ball became the first president. The stated early purpose, Wikipedia says, was for members to dine together once a year and share what they knew of the Alps.

When it began

The club's start is dated differently depending on what counts as the start.

• Wikipedia: the founding meeting was held at Ashley's Hotel, London, on 22 December 1857.
• American Alpine Journal (1958): the centenary article traces the idea to a party of Englishmen on the Finsteraarhorn on 13 August 1857, and the start of organisation to a dinner in Birmingham on 6 November 1857.

According to Wikipedia, the club admitted only men until 1974, and in 1975 agreed a merger with the Ladies' Alpine Club that added about 150 members.

The club's publications

The Alpine Journal's archive site says the first issue appeared on 2 March 1863, published by Longmans in London and edited by Hereford Brooke George. It replaced an earlier series called Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, whose first series is dated two ways: the Alpine Journal archive gives 1858, edited by John Ball, while Wikipedia gives 1859, with a second series in two volumes edited by Kennedy in 1862.

The Alpine Club appears alongside the other national bodies on who governs climbing.

The golden age of alpinism

Wikipedia dates the "golden age of alpinism" from Alfred Wills's ascent of the Wetterhorn in 1854 to the first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865, a decade in which many of the major Alpine peaks were climbed for the first time. It notes that Wills's climb was not the first ascent of the Wetterhorn, which had been climbed in 1844.

First ascents Wikipedia lists from that period include:

The Matterhorn, 1865

Edward Whymper's party of seven made the first ascent of the Matterhorn on 14 July 1865, from Zermatt by the Hornli ridge, according to ExplorersWeb and a search summary of National Geographic's July 2015 anniversary coverage.

The descent ended in a disaster that is part of the published record. Four of the party, Michel Croz, Charles Hudson, Douglas Hadow and Lord Francis Douglas, fell to their deaths when the rope broke. Whymper and the two Taugwalder guides survived. Peter Taugwalder was later tried and acquitted, and Douglas's body was never found. These details come from search summaries of ExplorersWeb and National Geographic, and they vary between accounts.

Wikipedia says the Matterhorn ascent is traditionally taken as the end of the golden age, and that in the UK the years that followed are called the "silver age of alpinism".

The next chapter moved from summits to rock itself: see the birth of rock climbing. The main dates on this page also appear in the timeline.