Mont Blanc is the highest point in the Alps, a rounded cap of snow rather than a peak, standing just over 4,800 metres on the French–Italian border above the town of Chamonix. It is also where climbing became a sport. A Geneva scientist, Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, put up a prize in 1760 for the first route to the top. It went unclaimed for twenty-five years, until two men from the valley, Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard, reached the summit in 1786. Saussure went up himself the year after, carrying instruments. Nobody can give the mountain a fixed height: the top is snow sitting on rock, and it thickens and thins. Surveyors climb every other September to measure what is there.
Two centuries on, the valley has built every way of getting you up without climbing. A cable car carries you from the valley floor to the Aiguille du Midi, a rock terrace at 3,842 metres, in about twenty minutes. It is fast enough that the thin air comes as a shock. A glass box called Step into the Void leaves you standing over a kilometre of nothing. From the terraces the granite aiguilles, the needles the range is made of, run one behind another to the horizon. A rack railway climbs to Montenvers above the Mer de Glace, the largest glacier in France, with an ice cave cut into its tongue at the bottom of the stairs. Two steep hours above the valley, Lac Blanc lies on a shelf at 2,352 metres, facing the full length of the massif. On a windless day the whole range stands doubled in it. Tandem paragliders launch from Plan de l'Aiguille at 2,300 metres and come down 1,200 metres over about twenty-five minutes above the Bossons glacier. Chamonix itself has been a town of guides since that first ascent, and it staged the first Winter Olympics in 1924. All of this exists to spare you the climb. A few metres below the terrace, at first light, roped parties are still filing down the knife-edge of snow to do it the other way.