What is the third hardest mountain in the world to climb?

Question

Remo Ω Aviron, I have no idea what the first 2 would be. Judging by popular opinion (not by real climbers), I imagine they'd be Everest and K2, the order being debatable.

Answer 1

Mount Everest from North col, Ama Dablam, Annapurna, and K-2 are among the most difficult ones. Many times descending is more dangerous than the climbing part.

Answer 2

Based on Dr.D's answer, I think Denali would be the third hardest. Shouldn't the first hardest be Olympus Mons? Everest is second hardest!  

Answer 3

What are your first two?

If you look carefully at Dr. D's poll, it is about the 7 summits, not mountains in general. By his method, Britton Hill is the 50th toughest summit in the US.  At 100m, it is the highest peak in Florida.  Do they have a cache at the top?

There are many criteria you could use, most dangerous (ice, avalanches, crumbly rock), risk of death, most physically demanding (cold, elevation, time), most technically challenging, most difficult to access, most expensive (i.e. cost of launching an expedition).  There are bolders that are tougher to climb than Everest (based on success rate -- not on consequences of failure).

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Trango towers look pretty cool.

(I personally like mountains that are a good hard slog up, good view -- not necessarily difficult, but rewarding, e.g. Shasta, et al.).

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Here are some more pictures of Trango.  Scroll down.  Pretty awsome.

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http...

Answer 4

How do decide which is the 3rd hardest? You could look at which peak has been climbed the 3rd fewest times. Or you could go off of which has the 3rd lowest success rate, that is for X numbers of climbers that attempted, Y number of climbers succeeded. But that would depend on your definition of success, some might say summiting is a success while others would argue that summitting and making it back down alive is a success.

Odds are that it would be in the Himalayas or the Korakorum ranges, but the third hardest might very well be in Alaska. For example, in David Roberts autobiography "On the Ridge Between Life and Death", he talks about a mountain they attempted to climb in Alaska, I believe it's Mt. Deborah, that at the time of publishing had never been climbed. It wasn't so much that it was a technical or challenging mountain, but it has brittle, crumbly rock that doesn't provide fall protection and because of its location, the snow pack is never "right" for climbing either. So even though Deborah is not overly challenging technically, it is essentially not climbable.

I realize this doesn't directly answer your question, but I hope it gives insight as to why you might recieve a hundred different answers about which mountain is the third hardest to climb.

Answer 5

Well if you're going to bring Olympus Mons into it, I'd wager that there are hundreds of mountains harder than Everest knocking around our solar system!

and yeah what you mean by hardest would depend on which route you go up. i guess you might mean the easiest route? but there's things like the Matterhorn in Switzerland which I think is just an Assez Difficile route, but the north face of it must be verrrry hard. Likewise I'm sure you could find an horrific route up Everest..

Answer 6

I think it's Carstensz Pyramid. I've never been able to climb that one.

The top 5 in an unofficial poll are:

Everest

Denali

Carstensz Pyramid

Vinson

Aconcagua

Answer 7

id go with everest maybe, you dont need to be amazing at climbing to do everest just obviously you need to be a decent climber but you need to be very physically and mentally fit

please answer mine

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