On 8 August 1786, Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard reached the top of Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps. They climbed without ropes or crampons, carrying a barometer to measure the altitude, and arrived at the summit shortly after six in the evening. The ascent answered a prize the naturalist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure had offered more than twenty years earlier, and it is generally treated as the founding event of modern mountaineering.
Why this oneMountaineering has a founding date, and a cash prize behind it.