Jules Jacot-Guillarmod

He received several honorary awards for his exploits: in 1920, he was appointed Officer of the Order of Saint Charles by Albert I of Monaco at the Monaco Mountaineering Congress and in 1925, King Fouad I of Egypt made him Grand Officer of the Order of the Nile at the International Geographical Congress in Cairo.

On 12 June 1897, after cycling from Martigny to Chamonix with two friends, he climbed Mont Blanc for the first time, without a mountain guide.

A few months later, on a training course in Paris, he gave a lecture on this climb at the Club Alpin Français (CAF) and was soon after accepted as a member.

After landing in Bombay on 21 March 1902, the group crossed India to Askoley, following the maps drawn ten years earlier by William Martin Conway up to Concordia Square on the Baltoro glacier; they were accompanied by a column of 150 porters.

From there, the group climbed up to the foot of K2, an area never reached before, but remained stuck for almost two months at base camp at an altitude of 5,700 metres due to bad weather.

On 10 July 1902 he explored the Northeast ridge of the K2 with one of the Austrians and reached an altitude of 6,700 metres, the highest point of the expedition.

In 1919, Dr. Georges Montandon, an ethnologist from Neuchâtel, was commissioned by the ICRC to visit the Austro-Hungarian prison camps in Siberia.

Jacot-Guillarmod was part of this nine-month mission, which passed through the United States and Japan, to inspect the camps in Russia.