The Deadliest Routes Up Mount Everest — Why Nobody Climbs Them

Everest has two famous routes. You have seen them both, even if you did not know it. They are the lines in every photograph, the ones behind those viral images of climbers queued nose to tail in the death zone. Between them, they account for almost every successful summit in history. But the mountain has been climbed more than a dozen other ways. Up sheer faces, along knife-edged ridges, by lines so hard and so dangerous that most of them have been climbed exactly once and never touched again. Almost nobody has heard of them. And here is the strange part. Those forgotten routes account for barely one in seventy of all the people who have ever reached the summit. But they account for more than one in five of everyone who has died on the mountain. The most crowded peak in the world hides its deadliest ground in plain sight, on the routes that nobody climbs anymore. This is the story of those routes, why they emptied out, and which one has killed more elite climbers than any other. Make sure to subscribe for weekly videos!