Clinton Thomas Dent

Clinton Thomas Dent FRCS (7 December 1850 – 26 August 1912) was an English surgeon, author and mountaineer.

The fourth surviving son of Thomas Dent, he was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge.

Alongside Albert Mummery, Dent was one of the most prominent of the British climbers who attempted the few remaining unclimbed mountains in the Alps in the period known as the silver age of alpinism. As an alpinist, Dent was very different from Mummery:

[He] lacked the other's fiery touch, nor did he yield to the call of the mountains with Mummery's zest. Dent's expeditions had an almost austerely classic perfection ... While Mummery's alpine career hardly met with any ill will from the mountains until the very end, Dent had to wage a long and protracted war against his greatest conquest, the Dru.

Dent's first ascents in the Alps include the Lenzspitze (4,294 m) in the Pennine Alps in August 1870, with Alexander Burgener and a porter, Franz Burgener (of whom Dent wrote 'his conversational powers were limited by an odd practice of carrying heavy parcels in his mouth'), and the Portjengrat (Pizzo d'Andollo, 3,654 m) above the valley of Saas-Fee in 1871. On 5 September 1872 the combined parties of Dent and guide Alexander Burgener, with George Augustus Passingham, and his guides Ferdinand Imseng and Franz Andermatten, made the first ascent of the south-east ridge of the Zinalrothorn (4,221 m); this is the current voie normale on the mountain.

He then turned his attention to the Aiguille du Dru (3,754 m), a steep granite peak in the Mont Blanc massif that had been ignored by the early generation of alpinists whose ambitions had been focused more on the higher mountains. After eighteen failed attempts with a number of different guides and companions (during which he used ladders to overcome difficulties), Dent at last made the first ascent of the Grande Aiguille du Dru (the higher of the mountain's two summits) on 12 September 1878, with James Walker Hartley and the guides Alexander Burgener and Kaspar Maurer. He wrote of the Dru:

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