The valley that taught the world to love mountains.
For most of human history, high mountains were things to be feared and avoided. The story of how that changed — of how Mont Blanc went from "the cursed mountains" to the birthplace of an entire culture — begins in Chamonix.
For centuries the people of the Chamonix valley lived quietly in the shadow of the highest mountain in the Alps, scratching a living from oats, rye and animal husbandry through long, brutal winters. The great glaciers tumbling from the peaks were not scenery. They were a threat — advancing ice that swallowed pasture, and, in local belief, the dwelling place of dragons and witches. The summits had a name: les montagnes maudites, the cursed mountains.
That began to change in the summer of 1741, when two young Englishmen on the Grand Tour, the antiquarian William Windham and the future bishop Richard Pococke, rode up from Geneva to see the valley for themselves. Guided to the edge of the great glacier above the hamlet of Les Bois, they were so struck by the frozen expanse — at the time more than 100 metres higher than it sits today — that they reached for the only image grand enough: a frozen sea. They called it the Mer de Glace, the Sea of Ice, and the name stuck.
Their published account turned a feared backwater into the most fashionable natural wonder in Europe — almost overnight.
Windham and Pococke wrote up their expedition, and their reports — vivid, a little sensationalised, full of frozen seas and otherworldly ice — were devoured across Europe. Within a generation the trickle of curious travellers became a flood. Madame Coutterand opened the valley's first guest house in 1770. By 1783 the likes of Goethe and the Genevan scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure had made the pilgrimage, and some 1,500 visitors were arriving each summer, many riding up to the Mer de Glace on the back of a mule.
The reward that conquered a mountain
It was Saussure who lit the fuse. Spellbound by Mont Blanc, in 1760 he offered a reward to the first person to find a route to its summit. For 26 years the mountain resisted. Then, on 8 August 1786, two local men — the doctor Michel-Gabriel Paccard and the crystal hunter Jacques Balmat — fought their way to the top, sleeping out high on the mountain and reaching the summit in the late afternoon before racing back down to their shelter in under five hours.
It was the first ascent of the highest mountain in the Alps, and it is now widely taken as the birth of modern mountaineering. Saussure himself summited the following year, dragging scientific instruments to 4,800 metres to take measurements no one had ever attempted. The argument over exactly who led on that first climb — Paccard or Balmat — would rumble on for over a century, the Alps' very first summit controversy. Today the two men stand cast in bronze in the centre of town: Balmat pointing Saussure toward the summit, on Place Balmat, framing very nearly the same view climbers saw almost 240 years ago.
From cursed peaks to Olympic flame
Through the 19th century Chamonix became the great arena of the golden age of alpinism, its guides — Balmat, Ravanel, the Charlet dynasty — among the most respected mountain men in the world. The railway arrived in 1901, and with it a quieter revolution: skiing began to shift from a way of getting around in winter to something people did for sport and pleasure.
That shift reached its climax in the bitter cold of January 1924, when Chamonix hosted what was then called International Winter Sports Week. Some 258 athletes from 16 nations competed across bobsleigh, cross-country, curling, figure skating, ice hockey, ski jumping and more. It was such a success that in 1926 the Olympic committee retrospectively crowned it the first Winter Olympic Games. The valley that Europe had once called cursed had become the birthplace of the Winter Olympics.
A century on, the same peaks draw over eight million overnight visitors a year — split almost evenly between winter snow and summer rock.
That is the strange magic of this place. In under three hundred years, Chamonix turned the very things people once feared — the ice, the height, the danger — into the things the whole world now travels here to find. The dragons are gone. The Sea of Ice, sadly, is retreating fast. But the valley they named still does to visitors exactly what it did to two lost Englishmen in 1741: it stops them in their tracks.
Sources & further reading: the Chamonix-Mont-Blanc tourist office history of the valley; the IOC on Chamonix 1924; and Britannica on the first Winter Olympic Games. Cham summarises and links back — we don't reproduce others' work as our own.