Aiguilles d'Arves
The Aiguilles d’Arves is a mountain in the Arves massif in the French Alps. The mountain, comprising three separate peaks, is the highest point of the massif, and is located in the department of Savoie.
Geography
The summits that make up the Aiguilles d'Arves are described in the following table.| Name | Translation | Height | First ascent |
| L’Aiguille Meridionale | The Southern Needle | Father and son Almer and W. A. B. Coolidge, 22 July 1878 | |
| L’Auguille Centrale | The Central Needle | Pierre Alexis and Benoît Nicolas Magnin in 1839 | |
| L’Aiguille Septentrionale, Bec Nord | The Northern Needle | Coolidge, father and son Almer, 23 July 1878 | |
| L’Aiguille Septentrionale, Bec Sud | The Northern Needle | Meta Brevoort, Coolidge, father and son Almer, in 1873 |
For reasons apparent from the picture, Aiguille Septentrionale is also called the Tête de Chat.
Ascents
The central peak of the Aiguilles d’Arves was first climbed by the brothers Pierre Alexis and Benoît Nicolas Magnin, from nearby Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne, on 2 September 1839. As evidence they built a cairn and left two Sardinian coins under a rock on the summit.The southern summit was first climbed by the Swiss mountain guides Christian and Ulrich Almer and their American client, W. A. B. Coolidge from New York. During the 1870s and 1880s, Coolidge claimed a number of first ascents and worked extensively in the Dauphiné Alps. Earlier, the same party had climbed L’Auguille Centrale in 1874. On the summit, they found the cairn built by the Magnin brothers, but ascribed it to "a legendary chamois hunter". The day after their ascent of L’Aiguille Meridionale in 1878, Benoît Magnin informed them about his ascent 39 years prior.