Q 01/05

Who led the 1492 ascent of Mont Aiguille, seen as the birth of mountaineering?

A) Antoine de Ville

B) Petrarch

C) Conrad Gessner

D) Horace-Bénédict de Saussure

Answer · why

A) Antoine de Ville

It was the first climb of any technical difficulty to be officially verified; Petrarch's 1336 ascent of Mont Ventoux was a mere walk by comparison.

Q 02/05

The 1786 first ascent of Mont Blanc was made by Jacques Balmat and whom?

A) Horace-Bénédict de Saussure

B) Michel-Gabriel Paccard

C) Marie Paradis

D) Edward Whymper

Answer · why

B) Michel-Gabriel Paccard

Saussure had offered a reward for the climb after his own failed attempts from 1757 onwards.

Q 03/05

Who became the first woman to climb Mont Blanc, in 1808?

A) Henriette d'Angeville

B) Fanny Bullock Workman

C) Marie Paradis

D) Lucy Walker

Answer · why

C) Marie Paradis

Henriette d'Angeville followed thirty years later, in 1838.

Q 04/05

The world's first mountaineering club, the Alpine Club, was founded in London in which year?

A) 1871

B) 1888

C) 1895

D) 1857

Answer · why

D) 1857

Its early members were once dismissed as doing very little climbing but a lot of walking steeply uphill.

Q 05/05

Sir Alfred Wills' 1854 ascent of which peak started the Golden Age of Alpinism?

A) The Eiger

B) The Jungfrau

C) The Matterhorn

D) The Wetterhorn

Answer · why

D) The Wetterhorn

Wills made mountaineering fashionable in Britain, and most of the great Alpine peaks fell over the next decade.