Mountains Lower Than Everest But Much Harder to Climb

There is a mountain in Pakistan more than fifteen hundred meters lower than Everest. No crowds, no fixed-rope highway, no line of climbers waiting their turn. And after it was first climbed in 1977, it waited twenty four years for anyone to reach its summit again. On that first ascent, one of the two men who made it broke both of his legs on the very first rappel down, then crawled for a week, through storms, to get off the mountain alive. That mountain is not Everest, and it is barely half as famous. But by the only measure that counts, how hard it is to climb and come back, it makes the standard route up Everest look almost manageable. Because height is only one part of what makes a mountain dangerous. Everest is the tallest, but its normal route is also the most prepared: ladders, fixed ropes, stocked camps, forecasts, oxygen, rescue. The five mountains we’re gonna talk about in this video, strip all of that away. We are not ranking them by death rate. We are ranking the whole climbing problem: technical difficulty, objective danger, weather, remoteness, and descent. And as we count down, the danger shifts, from what the mountain does to you, the avalanche you cannot outrun, toward what it demands of you, the skill that no oxygen or rope can replace. Number five can erase its own route overnight. Number one may be the hardest thing in mountaineering. Make sure to subscribe for weekly videos!