With a summit of 4,809m,
Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in the Alps and in Western Europe.
The mountain is located in
the French Alps, very close to the border with Italy.
Mont Blanc is “owned” by
both France and Italy under a bilateral agreement. The lowest recorded
temperature on Mont Blanc is -43°C, set in January 1893.
More than 20,000 climbers
reach the summit of the mountain every year.
In
2013, a French mountain climber ascending Mont Blanc found something besides
stunning views: a box containing about $340,000 worth of precious stones.
The
gems—an assortment of emeralds, sapphires, and rubies—are believed to have been
on an Air India flight that crashed on the mountain in 1966.
All
117 passengers and crew members were killed in the crash of the Kanchenjanga, a
plane named, somewhat ironically, for the world’s third-highest mountain.
The
plane was bound to New York from Mumbai and crashed on its way to Geneva from
Beirut. Among the passengers was Homi Jehangir Bhabha, a physicist regarded as
the father of India’s nuclear program, which gave rise to conspiracy theories
about the crash
Due
to global warming Mont Blanc’s Bosson glacier is receding, which has exposed
more of the wreckage from the crash.
The
climber handed over the gems to the authorities, as required by French law.
After efforts to find the rightful owners of the gems were unsuccessful, the unnamed
climber was rewarded with half of them. The government in Chamonix,
France, will retain the other half.
The
discovery of precious cargo from a mountain plane crash is unusual but not
unheard of. In the US, a small plane
loaded with 6,000 pounds of marijuana crashed in California’s Sierra
Nevada mountains above Yosemite National park in 1976, supplying enterprising
climbers with free weed for years.
