It is rare to literally walk in the footsteps of history. When we approached with great difficulty the refuge of Tête-Rousse, the first stage of our attempt to climb Mont Blanc, a name echoed at every step in my brain: that of Jacques Balmat. This guide passed to posterity for having been the first to climb, with the doctor Michel Gabriel Paccard, the Roof of Europe. It was August 8, 1786. “Without crampons, ice axes or ropes but with a large stick and studded shoes, Balmat and Paccard reached the summit at 6:23 pm”, tells me Julien Pelloux, our high mountain guide.
Also a historian, Julien measures more than any other the feat achieved that day by the two men. Because they not only defeated an ice giant deemed inaccessible but swept away the superstitions surrounding this other world that was then the high mountain. “People said it was the Devil’s landmark and that we couldn’t survive it,” he explains. When Paccard comes back down, it’s Balmat, “a force of nature”, who supports him. The unprotected eyes, victim of an ophthalmia of snow, the doctor sees nothing any more. When the guide returns to the valley, crowned with his pioneer status, the King of Piedmont Sardinia authorizes him to be called “Jacques Balmat du Mont-Blanc”.
VIDEO. Mont Blanc deconfined
“Even today, we consider him to be the father of our profession,” greeted Julien Pelloux. Especially since Balmat does not stop there. In 1808, it was he who took the first woman to the top. Servant of an inn, Marie Paradis reached Mont Blanc with difficulty on July 14, 1808. “The ascent was epic because she was in a dress and was sick during the ascent,” says Gabriel Grandjacques, heritage assistant and historian in Saint-Gervais (Haute-Savoie). In a moment of despair, Marie lets go of her guide friends: “Put me in a crevasse and go wherever you want.” »« We are leading you to the top », answer his guardian angels. “They pulled me, pushed, carried and we arrived”, will tell the young woman.
At the top, Marie feels that her legs are abandoning her. “She ate snow with her full handful, heartache was involved and she ended up at the top almost fainting,” continues Gabriel Grandjacques. The feat of the daughter of the country remains surprisingly buried in the eternal snows. Until another woman, a Franco-Swiss aristocrat, climbs the Roof of Europe again and makes it known. Henriette d’Angeville, nicknamed “the bride of Mont Blanc”, walks thirty years later in the same steps as those of Marie Paradis. But she prepared for it differently.
Equipped with a quilted dress, baggy pants, a curved fur coat and an insulating hooded boater, she surrounds herself with 12 guides and porters to climb the mother of the mountains. “At the top, it is said that she asked her guides to carry her on their shoulders to be higher than Mont Blanc,” explains Julien Pelloux.
Four years earlier, the legend Jacques Balmat had suddenly died out, the guide having fallen into a crevasse in the heart of the Giffre massif. “It is said that he had gone there to look for a vein of gold”, specifies the historian of Saint-Gervais. This myth of a treasure hidden in the bowels of Mont Blanc resurfaced a century and a half later following an air disaster.
On January 24, 1966, an Air India Boeing 707 with 177 passengers crashed under the summit. There are no survivors. Trapped in seracs and crevices, the carcass of the device and its contents resurface at regular intervals when the glacier regurgitates them. Just a few days ago, on July 10, the manager of a restaurant bar located at 1350 meters above sea level thus stumbled upon the remains of the aircraft. In this case a dozen dailies dated January 20 and 21, 1966, including Indian headlines announcing the election of Indira Gandhi, the country’s first woman Prime Minister.
The Malabar Princess crashed nearby
The block of ice in which they had been kept until now had probably melted because they were “in the open air, posed in the snow” as tells Timothée Mottin, the guardian of the Cerro hut. Installed under the Cossons Glacier, this place that we had the chance to discover is both mythical and little known. Because in this cabin are gathered the remains (photos, landing gear, objects…) of the Boeing Air India and of another plane, the Malabar Princess, which had crashed sixteen years earlier in the same place. “In years of drought, we sometimes see pieces of scrap metal resurface from the glacier”, testifies Julien Pelloux.
In 2013, a young Savoyard mountaineer fell on a box of precious stones while hiking, probably from the Boeing Air India. Emeralds, sapphires and rubies were sealed at the time and the treasure had been claimed by six people including a London jeweler. “In 1834, when Jacques Balmat disappeared, some said that he himself had found a treasure in the heart of the mountain, but his body was never found,” explains Julien Pelloux. The only trace still visible of this legend is located in the limestone wall of the Dard à Sixt where a climbing route was baptized … “the Treasure of Balmat”.
