Marie Paradis

c. 1778-1839

Henriette D'Angeville

1791-1871

The first woman to climb Mont Blanc, the highest peak in West Europe, was Marie Paradis [right], an illiterate local innkeeper who lived below it. She was a single mom whose son had skipped town, leaving his wife and child for Marie to take care of. In 1808, Marie was persuaded by a team of passing mountaineers that if she came with them and became the first woman to reach the top, visitors would then pay a lot of money to stay at her inn and hear her stories.

Marie was game for the attempt but unprepared for the ordeal. She was ill from altitude sickness much of the way up, and she begged her hiking companions to just throw her into a crevasse to put her out of her misery. They dragged her up the mountain, then back down, and she never tried anything that stupid again.

Thirty years later, in 1838, Henriette d'Angeville [left] was the second woman to climb Mont Blanc, but the first to do so under her own power and for what serious mountaineers considered the right reasons.

She fell in love with Mont Blanc the first time she laid eyes on it as a child. She trained for years. As a wealthy and childless countess, she could dedicate herself full-time to the endeavor. She consulted a physician beforehand about the dangers she would face. She had a full team and the best equipment for the job. She kept a journal on her way up and back. Her motives were pure. She did it for the challenge and the love of nature.

These two ladies befriended each other over their shared experience and don't appear to have gotten into a rivalry about who did it better. However, later writers were disappointed by their cordiality, and have argued for two centuries about who really deserves the credit for the first climb.


Explorers and Daredevils: Grace Darling Henriette D'Angeville and Marie Paradis Mary Kingsley Sacagawea Sally Ride Amelia Earhart Bessie Coleman Harriet Quimby Raymonde de Laroche