Venance Payot

Venance Payot (June 26, 1826 – March 13, 1902) was a naturalist, glaciologist, alpine mountain-guide, scholar, author, and two-time mayor of Chamonix, France.

He has been posthumously credited in mountaineering literature with being the youngest person (as of 1843) to have climbed Mont Blanc, and would have been sixteen years old at the time; other sources have challenged this.

His father was Pierre-Joseph Payot (1791–1858), who was a mountain guide and who led the writer Alexandre Dumas on a journey to the Mer de Glace, accompanied by the young Venance.

[11] He also built up a considerable collection of books on the natural sciences and later donated some 385 items to Annecy Library, along with a 2,000 franc sum to maintain and expand it.

[13] Payot made many botanical studies of the mountains of the Mont Blanc massif, publishing numerous academic books or pamphlets on the subject, including vascular plants, ferns, bryophytes, and herpetology.