James Eccles

James Eccles FGS (1838 – 6 June 1915) was an English mountaineer and geologist who is noted for making a number of first ascents in the Alps during the silver age of alpinism.

[1] Eccles began climbing in the Alps in the 1860s[1] and made an early ascent of the Matterhorn on 20 July 1869 from the Breuil side, employing J.

[4] Alpine historian C. Douglas Milner called Eccles a climber of "exceptional calibre" and his guides the Payot brothers as "the finest that Chamonix could provide at that time".

[6] Eccles made the first ascent of the upper part of the Peuterey ridge,[8][9] having failed in an attempt on 28 July 1877.

Back in London, while walking down the Strand, he saw displayed in a shop window a telephoto showing Mont Blanc and that amphitheatre taken from Crammont.

From there they climbed onto the Peuterey ridge above the Grand Pilier d'Angle via a steep couloir, reaching the summit of Mont Blanc de Courmayeur nine hours after leaving their bivouac under Pic Eccles.

I struggled on in dignified silence, but Michel's remonstrances if not generally intelligible were sufficiently audible.Eccles attempted to make the first ascent of Grand Teton (an ascent was claimed in 1872 by Nathaniel P. Langford and James Stevenson, but was probably of The Enclosure, a side peak of Grand Teton) in 1878 with Wilson, his assistant Harry Yount, and Payot.

Of his 1878 trip with Hayden's team he wrote in preface to his "On the Mode of Occurrence of some of the Volcanic Rocks of Montana, U.S.A.": In the autumn of 1878 I had the good fortune to accompany Dr. Hayden and other members of his survey in some parts of the district referred to; and although I have no intention of giving a detailed description of the volcanic phenomena which were observed, a short notice of the localities whence the specimens were obtained, and of the general mode of occurrence of the rocks, may be of some interest as a supplement to Mr. Rutley's description of their microscopic characters.In 1881 Eccles befriended T. G. Bonney, an alpinist of some repute and professor of geology at University College, London.