SCARIEST STAIRS in the world

A step on any of these stairs could cost you your life, so today I'm counting down 15 of the downright scariest stairs in the world. So let's start with number 15, El Peñón de Guatapé, Colombia. About two hours east of Medellín, out on the flat green Colombian countryside, like a fist punched up through the earth, there's this enormous granite monolith called It stands about 650 feet tall and its walls are nearly vertical on every side. For centuries, the local people there considered the rock sacred and untouchable. Then, in 1954, three locals decided to climb it. It took them five days, using stakes hammered into a crack in the rock face, and at some point after that, somebody looked at this enormous sheer-sided boulder and said, let's build a staircase. The staircase at El Peñón de Guatapé consists of 740 steps built into a zigzagging structure wedged into a natural fissure. The steps are made of brick and concrete, laid into the crack in the rock like a spine made of stairs. From a distance, the staircase looks like a scar that runs up the face of the rock. It's a thin line of human construction cutting up through the smooth granite. Up close, it looks like something you'd find in a video game. An absurdly steep, switchback staircase clinging to the side of a sheer-walled monolith. The climb takes about 30 minutes for most people, and the view at the top is one of the most spectacular panoramas. A vast landscape of lakes, islands, peninsulas, and green hills stretching out to the horizon, with the reservoirs of a hydroelectric system glittering like scattered mirrors across the land below. On a clear day, you can see for over 30 miles, and the summit has a small viewing platform up there, a couple of vendor stalls selling water and snacks, and a three-story observation tower that adds another 50 feet of elevation. The descent, predictably, is worse than the ascent. Your knees know exactly how far down it is, and they'd like you to know that they did not agree to this. 14. The Chandbhauri Stepwell in Rajasthan So, most of the stairs on this list go up. These go down, 13 stories down, into the earth. Chandbhauri is a stepwell in the village of Abhineri in Rajasthan in India, and it contains about 3,500 narrow steps, arranged in a perfectly symmetrical pattern across three of its four walls, descending over 100 feet below to the surface of a pool of green water at the bottom. Looking down into it from the top is kind of like looking into an M.C. Escher drawing. You're dizzying the repeating pattern of stairs, landings, and shadows that seem to fold in on themselves. Chandbhauri was built in the 9th century, about 1,200 years ago, during the reign of King Chanda, and its purpose was practical. Rajasthan is one of the driest regions in India, and stepwells were engineered as a water-harvesting system, designed to reach the water table deep below the surface and provide communities with a reliable water supply. But where most stepwells were utilitarian structures with simple stairways leading down to the water, Chandbhauri is something far more ambitious. It's a masterpiece, an enormous inverted pyramid of interlocking staircases arranged in 13 levels of perfect repeating symmetry. The steps themselves are pretty narrow, barely wide enough for a single foot, and they are steep, dropping at an angle that would make a modern building inspector very uncomfortable. Each of the three stepwalls contain hundreds of tiny stairs arranged in a V-pattern that converges towards the center of the well at the bottom. The fourth wall, the one without the stairs, features a series of ornate carved galleries, balconies, and pavilions that are cut into the rock, and the temperature down there at the bottom is reportedly five to six degrees cooler than the surface, which is like a natural air conditioning effect that made the stepwell popular gathering place during the scorching summers. But Chandbhauri is now one of the deepest and largest stepwells in India, and its visual impact has made it a favorite of photographers and filmmakers. It appeared in the 2012 Batman film The Dark Knight Rises, and it's been featured in numerous travel documentaries and design publications. But walking down the steps is technically possible, but officially discouraged. The stairs are ancient, narrow, uneven, and entirely without railings, and a fall from the upper levels would end on stone, not water. 13. PALIÓN DEL DIABLO, ECUADOR In the cloud forests of central Ecuador, about 20 minutes outside the adventure tourism town of Baños de Agua Santa, there's a waterfall called Palión del Diablo, the Devil's Cauldron, and it's one of the most visually amazing waterfalls in South America. The Pastaza River drops about 260 feet over a series of cascades down into a gorge. The noise here is deafening, the spray is constant, and the rocks are perpetually wet and slippery. Running down the cliff face beside the waterfall carved into the rock, bolted to the stone, and in some places tunneled directly through the cliff behind the falling water itself, is a staircase that's equal parts thrilling and extremely terrifying. The stairs here at Palión del Diablo are not one single staircase, there are a network of metal walkways, stone steps, narrow tunnels, and suspension bridges that descend from the clifftop viewing area to the base of the falls, passing through the rock and behind the curtain of water at several points along the way. The experience of walking behind the waterfall, standing in a carved-out cave with the river pouring over the opening in front of you like a liquid wall, is one of the most immersive natural encounters available anywhere in Ecuador. And then there's the steps, they're wet, they're steep, they're narrow in some places, and some sections have metal railings that are more psychological comfort than structural protection. Other sections have chains, and at certain points you're climbing down steps that have been cut directly into the cliff. The staircase continues down to a lower viewing platform at the base of the main cascade where the full power of the Devil's Cauldron is on display, it's just a wall of white water crashing into a boiling pool of spray and foam. The climb back up, of course, is grueling, soaking, and loud, most visitors arrive at the top dripping wet, slightly deaf, and grinning in the way that only people who have just done something mildly reckless and gotten away with it can grin. The stairs here at Pellon del Diablo are not the highest on this list, not the steepest, they're not the most exposed, but they are the wettest, and there's something uniquely terrifying about climbing a staircase that's been actively rained on by a 200-foot waterfall while you're trying to maintain your footing on stone steps that have been polished smooth by decades of spray and tourists. 12. Skellig Michael, County Kerry in Ireland Seven miles off the southwestern tip of Ireland, rising from the grey Atlantic like the jagged spine of some drowned mountain, there's these two rocky islands called Skelligs. The larger one, Skellig Michael, is a steep wave-battered pyramid of slate and sandstone, which reaches 714 feet above the ocean. Perched on a narrow saddle of rock between two peaks, there's a 1400-year-old monastery that was home to a small community of Christian monks from roughly the 6th century to the 12th. Getting to the monastery requires climbing 618 ancient stone steps, dry-laid, un-mortared, hand-cut slabs of rock set into the hillside. The steps have been sitting there, exposed to the Atlantic wind and rain, for 14 centuries. They've got no barriers on either side and the drop on the seaward edge falls directly into the ocean hundreds of feet below. And every year, about 15,000 people climb them. Getting to Skellig Michael at all requires a 45-minute boat ride. Landings are weather-dependent and frequently cancelled. The seas around Skelligs are exposed to the full force of the North Atlantic. When conditions allow, small boats dock at a narrow concrete pier at the base of the island and then visitors begin to climb up a winding stone path that becomes, as it rises, progressively steeper. The final 618 steps to the monastery are the originals, 1400-year-old stone slabs fitted together without mortar. The steps are uneven, some of them are narrow, some are tilted, and there's no railing for most of the ascent. The wind at the altitude here over an exposed Atlantic island can be ferocious and visitors are regularly advised to stay low and brace themselves. But looking down from the upper steps, you can see the Atlantic crashing against the rocks hundreds of feet below. And then there's seabirds, puffins, gannets, and storm petrels. They wheel through the air at eye level, completely unbothered by the altitude that's making your knees shake. The monastery at the top is extraordinary. A cluster of beehive-shaped stone huts, dry stone walls, a small oratory, a carved stone cross is all built by a handful of monks who chose to live on this windswept, battered rock. The site is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and it gained some global fame as the filming location for the Star Wars sequel trilogy, where it served as the planet Octo. This is the island where Luke Skywalker went to hide. The monks who built the steps here never knew that the staircase would one day be climbed by people dressed in Star Wars costumes. But they did build it to last, and 14 centuries later, it's still standing, still climbable, and it's still one of the most atmospheric and genuinely nerve-wracking staircases. Number 11. Wat Tam Suay, Tiger Cave Temple in Thailand. In the Krabi province of southern Thailand, surrounded by tropical jungle and the kind of heat that makes even breathing feel like exercise, there's a Buddhist temple called Wat Tam Suay, the Tiger Cave Temple. The main attraction here is not the temple at the base, though it is beautiful. The main attraction is what sits at the top of the cliff above it, a golden Buddha statue and a sacred footprint shrine on a summit platform 600 meters above sea level. It's accessible only by climbing 1,260 steps straight up the face of a limestone cliff. The staircase here is not a gentle winding path up a hillside, it is a near-vertical assault on a limestone wall. There's no flat sections, there's no rest areas built into the staircase itself. There are occasional shaded landings, where exhausted climbers can sit on the steps and reconsider their choices. But the gradient doesn't ease at any point, it just keeps going up step after step after step for 1,260 steps. The sweat is immediate, torrential and continuous. Monkeys, long-tailed macaques, lie in the lower sections of the staircase. They watch climbers with the amused detachment of creatures who can scale the cliff in seconds and find the human struggle entertaining. The steps are in reasonable condition, maintained by the temple and repaired periodically, but they're steep enough that many climbers abandon all pretense of casual hiking. At several points, the gradient approaches that of a ladder, looking up from the base at one of these steep sections to see the stairs vanishing into the canopy. The views improve dramatically with altitude. The jungle canopy drops away and the landscape opens up. The limestone towers appear on the horizon like a fleet of stone ships. A mangrove coast emerges to the west and the turquoise Andaman Sea glitters beyond. About two-thirds of the way up, the staircase passes through a narrow saddle between two cliff sections, where the wind funnels through and provides a brief, merciful blast of cool air. And then the final push begins, another 400 steps just as steep, with the summit platform visible above, but stubbornly refusing to get any closer. By the time you arrive at the top, dripping, trembling, lungs on fire and deeply questioning whether spiritual enlightenment requires this much suffering, you're rewarded with a 360-degree panorama stretching from the islands to the interior mountains. And there, at the summit, sitting on a gilded platform with an expression of total, infuriating, transcendent calm, is a golden Buddha looking over the landscape as if 1,200 steps in a 35-degree heat with 90% humidity was the most effortless thing in the world. The descent is harder than the climb, your knees are absorbing the full impact of every one of those 1,260 steps on the way down, the concrete is slippery from humidity in the shaded sections, and the gradient that felt merely brutal going up feels actively dangerous coming down. The monkeys, though, they're still there, they're still watching and still amused, and your quadriceps are going to remind you what you did for approximately the next three to four days. 10. 999 Steps to Heaven's Gate, Tianmen Mountain, China Tianmen Mountain rises about 5,000 feet up. Near the summit, there's a natural arch in the rock, this massive hole through the mountain called Tianmen Cave, or Heaven's Gate. It's roughly 430 feet tall and 190 feet wide. Reaching the cave from the mountain road below requires climbing 999 steps, a number chosen deliberately because in Chinese culture, the number 9 symbolizes eternity and the emperor, and 999 was considered the most auspicious number possible for a staircase leading to a place called Heaven's Gate. The steps are steep, they're narrow, and they're seemingly endless, rising up in a straight line up the face of the mountain from a paved plaza at the base to the yawning mouth of the natural arch. From the bottom, looking up, the staircase just disappears into the clouds, and the climb takes about 30 to 45 minutes for most people, and the altitude, the gradient, and the repetitiveness of nearly a thousand identical stone steps combine to make it one of the most physically grueling stair climbs. The steps have no shade either, and some of the stones radiate heat. In winter, they can be icy and treacherous. The railings are present, but they're low, and the exposure increases as you climb. But once you're standing inside Heaven's Gate, looking back down at the 999 steps you just climbed, it's one of those moments where your legs, your lungs, and your eyes are all telling you different things. Your legs say, don't do that again, your lungs agree, and your eyes say, yeah, it was absolutely worth every single step. This mountain is also home to the Tianmen Mountain Glass Walkway. This is a narrow path with a glass floor bolted to the cliff at about 4,700 feet up. There's a cable car ride that holds the record for the longest passenger cableway in the world at over 4 miles. But yeah, the 999 steps remain the main event, the thing that people come for, and the thing that people dread. 999 steps to Heaven's Gate, and every single one of them earned. 9. Sigiriya, Sri Lanka In the center of Sri Lanka, rising abruptly from the green plains of the cultural triangle, there's a massive column of rock, a volcanic plug left standing after the softer rock eroded away. Sigiriya, this is lion's rock, stands roughly 660 feet above the surrounding land. The vertical wall, stained orange and gray by centuries of weathering, and on its summit, accessible only by climbing about 1,200 steps carved into and bolted to the rock face, are the ruins of a royal palace and fortress built in the 5th century AD by King Kashyapa. The climb to the top of Sigiriya is one of the great experiences in South Asian travel, and one of the most nerve-wracking. The lower steps wind through landscaped gardens and past ancient walls and moats, and the remains of elaborate water features that once made the base of the rock a royal pleasure garden. The middle section passes the famous Sigiriya frescoes, these are vivid paintings of celestial maidens that have survived on the cliff face for over 1,500 years, and the mirror wall, a polished plaster surface where visitors have been scratching graffiti since the 8th century. The steps here are cut into the rock and fitted with metal railings, but the exposure is increasing, the ground drops away on both sides and the view of the plains below becomes progressively more dramatic. The final ascent passes through the lion's gate, these two enormous carved lion's paws flanking the stairway, the through whose open mouth visitors would have climbed to reach the summit. The lion's body is gone, it was destroyed by centuries of weathering, but the paws remain, each one taller than a person. The drop on either side here is several hundred feet down and the steps are steep and narrow. At the top though, the ruins of Kashyapa's 5th century palace spread out across the summit, foundations of buildings, the remains of a swimming pool, cisterns cut into the rock to collect rainwater, and gardens that once made the summit of this fortress palace one of the most lavish royal residences of the ancient world. Kashyapa ruled from this summit for 18 years before his half-brother returned with an army and defeated him. The place was abandoned, the jungle reclaimed it, and the stairs, all 1,200 of them carved into the side of a rock that a king chose specifically because it was almost impossible to climb, have been drawing visitors upwards ever since. Number 8. Jacob's Ladder, Jamestown, St. Helena. On the South Atlantic island of St. Helena, the tiny British overseas territory famous primarily as the place where Napoleon was exiled and died, there's a staircase that goes straight up the side of a cliff from the center of the capital town of Jamestown to the top of Ladder Hill, 602 feet above. The staircase is called Jacob's Ladder. It's got 699 steps, and it doesn't curve, it doesn't switch back, it doesn't even meander. It goes up in a single, unbroken, ruler-straight line from bottom to top. Jacob's Ladder was originally built in 1829 as an inclined railway to haul manure from the town's stables to the farmland on the plateau above. When the railway was decommissioned, the tracks were removed and replaced with steps, and the residents of Jamestown gained what is almost certainly the most direct, most brutal, and vertically efficient staircase in the southern hemisphere. The steps rise at an average gradient of about 40 degrees, steep enough that at certain points on the climb, the step above you is at chest height rather than knee height. The staircase is visible from almost everywhere in Jamestown. It dominates the southern end of the town like a scar on the hillside. Tourists and sailors and visiting military personnel treat it as a fitness challenge, timing their ascent, racing each other to the top, and occasionally crawling the final hundred steps on hands and knees when their legs give out. The current record for the fastest ascent is reportedly under five minutes, which is an almost incomprehensible achievement for anyone who's attempted the climb at a normal pace and found themselves gasping for air by step number 200. But the view from the top is worth the suffering. The entire town of Jamestown is spread out below you in a narrow valley. St. Helena is one of the most isolated inhabited islands on Earth. The nearest landmass is the coast of Africa, about 1,200 miles to the east. And standing on top of the Jacob's Ladder looking out over the ocean, with nothing between you and the curve of the planet but the water and the sky, you feel that isolation in your bones. Then you look down at the 699 steps you just climbed, arranged in a single terrifying straight line from summit to sea level, and you feel something else entirely. A mixture of pride, exhaustion, and the dawning realization that you gotta go back down again. Moving on to number seven, the Florli Stairs, Norway. On the eastern shore of Norway's Lysefjord, the same deep fjord that's home to the famous Pulpit Rock and Kirkegården, there's a staircase that holds the distinction of being the longest wooden stairway in the world. The Florli Stairs consist of 4,444 steps, climbing up from the fjord shore at sea level to the top of the mountain plateau about 2,400 feet above. It follows the path of an old hydroelectric penstock. This is a pipe that once carried water from the mountain reservoir down to the power station at the water's edge. The staircase was built along the penstock so the maintenance workers could access the pipe along the entire length, and when the original power station was decommissioned, the staircase was preserved as a hiking trail. The world's longest wooden stairway is open to the public and free to climb. That climb takes most hikers between two to three hours, and the gradient is pretty rough. The stairs follow the penstock pipe up to the mountainside at a constant, punishing angle with no flat sections. The steps are made of wood, pressure-treated timber bolted to a steel frame. The wooden treads can be slippery in wet conditions, and the railing where it does exist is a single metal bar that serves more as a psychological comfort than a genuine safety feature. But what makes the Florli Stairs unique on this list isn't their steepness or even their danger. They're not the most exposed or the most terrifying. It's their grinding, soul-testing length. 4,444 steps. By comparison, the Empire State Building has 1,576 steps. The Eiffel Tower, 1,665. The Florli Stairs have nearly three times as many. But at the top, the plateau opens up into a vast landscape of lakes, moss, and bare rock. The Norwegian mountain wilderness stretches to the horizon in every direction. It's wild and empty, and profoundly quiet. Hikers who have climbed all the steps tend to sit down at the top, stare at the view, eat whatever food they brought with them, and just silently acknowledge that they just climbed a staircase that's almost certainly longer than anything they'll ever climb again in their lives. And then they look at the stairs leading back down, and realize with the specific sinking feeling that only gravity and wooden planks can produce, that the descent is going to be just as long. 6, Mount Nissen, Switzerland The Nissenlauf. It's a race. It happens once a year, in June, in the Bernese Oberland region of Switzerland. And it involves running, actually running, up 11,674 steps from the base of Mount Nissen to the summit at 7,700 feet above sea level. The staircase follows the route of the Nissenbahn funicular railway, climbing 5,400 vertical feet in a continuous, unbroken ascent. And for 364 days a year, it's closed to the public. The only day you can climb it is on race day. The staircase was built alongside the funicular tracks to provide maintenance access. The steps are narrow service stairs, they're built for railway workers, not tourists, and they run parallel to the track at a gradient that matches the ascent angle, which is, in a word, severe. The race, the Nissenlauf. It's been held since 1988, and it tracks roughly 600 runners each year who compete to climb all 11,674 steps in the fastest possible time. The current record is just over an hour. It's an achievement so physically extraordinary it does border on the medically inadvisable. The staircase is not open to the public on non-race days for good reason. It's a maintenance structure, it's not a hiking trail. Climbing all the steps up the side of a mountain without the support of infrastructure of an organized race would be dangerous and probably inadvisable for even experienced hikers. But the railway itself carries normal visitors to the top in about 30 minutes, depositing them at a hotel and a viewing platform with amazing views of the Bernese Alps, Lake Thun and the Eiger, Monk and Jungfrau Massifs in the distance. Those visitors can look down at the mountain, see the staircase running alongside the tracks in an endless vertiginous line from summit to valley, and feel a combination of admiration and relief that they chose the train. But it holds the Guinness World Record for the longest staircase on earth, 11,674 steps, rising nearly a mile vertically alongside a funicular track. Whether that makes it the scariest staircase in the world depends on your definition of scary. If scary means exposed and vertigo-inducing, other entries on this list have it beaten. But if scary means the prospect of standing at the bottom and looking up at nearly 12,000 steps disappearing into the sky and knowing the only way to the top is to climb every single one of them, then yeah, Mount Nissen's in a category all by itself. If you're enjoying the video, please drop us a like and a comment, it really does help the channel out. 5. Huayna Picchu, Peru Behind every photograph of Machu Picchu, every postcard, screensaver, travel magazine cover, there's a mountain, rises up directly behind the ruins. It's a steep green pyramid covered in tropical vegetation, and appears in so many images of the Inca citadel that most people assume it's just part of the scenery. It's not. It's Huayna Picchu, and you can climb it. The Incas built a staircase to the top over 500 years ago and it's still there. And it is one of the most terrifyingly narrow, yet heart-stoppingly beautiful climbs in all of South America. The Peruvian authorities limit access to it to 400 visitors a day, split into two timed entry groups, and permits sell out weeks or months in advance during the peak season. The hike itself takes about 45 minutes to an hour to reach the summit, and the route follows the Inca stone stairs that were carved into the granite five centuries ago. They're made of hand-cut stone that's been polished smooth by centuries of foot traffic and tropical rain, and they climb the side of a mountain that drops away on either side, with the Urumbamba River winding through the river valley over 2,000 feet below. The most famous, and the most feared section, is the so-called Stairs of Death, a near-vertical stretch of Inca stone steps that ascends a narrow granite ridge. The steps are cut directly into the rock and it places you on a climbing, what essentially is a stone ladder with your hands, gripping the steps above while your feet search for the steps below. It's the combination of altitude, the steep gradient, narrow steps, the wet stone, and the drop-offs on both sides that makes this one of the most genuinely dangerous tourist hikes in the world. Your reward at the top though is extraordinary, a small summit platform with 360 degree views of Machu Picchu spread out below. The perspective from up there is the reverse of the famous postcard view. Instead of looking at the ruins with the mountain behind them, you're looking down at the ruins from the mountain itself. The terraces, the temples, the plazas, the agricultural zones, all of it is visible from above, arranged across the saddle of the ridge like a stone city laid out on a green tabletop. The view you're seeing is the same view they saw, and the terror you felt on the way up is probably exactly the same terror they felt, which is oddly comforting, and not comforting at all. Number 4. Adam's Peak in Sri Lanka. In the central highlands of Sri Lanka, that stands about 7,359 feet above sea level, there's this mountain called Adam's Peak, or Sripada, which means sacred footprint. It's been the site of religious pilgrimage for over a thousand years. At the summit, there's a natural depression in the rock that different faiths have interpreted differently. Buddhists believe it's the footprint of the Buddha, Hindus attribute it to Shiva, Christians and Muslims say it was left by Adam when he was expelled from the Garden of Eden and took his first step on Earth. Regardless of which tradition you follow, getting to the footprint requires the same thing, climbing about 5,500 steps in the dark, starting at 2 o'clock in the morning, in order to reach the summit before sunrise. The pre-dawn ascent is the traditional way to climb Adam's Peak, and during the pilgrimage, which runs from December to May, when the weather is the driest and the skies are the clearest, thousands of people make the climb every night. The steps are a combination of concrete, stone and metal grating, illuminated by strings of bare light bulbs and the headlamps of the climbers ahead and behind you. The procession of lights winding up the dark mountainside is one of the most iconic images of Sri Lankan culture, a glowing serpent of pilgrims and tourists ascending through the darkness towards the summit. The climb takes between three to five hours depending on fitness and the density of the crowds, and the stairs do get progressively steeper as you climb. The final section, the last thousand or so steps before the summit, is the steepest and most crowded, as everyone who started at different times through the night converge on the peak for sunrise. The air cools down as you climb and by the time you reach the summit at 7,359 feet, the temperature can be genuinely cold, a shock for the visitors who started the climb in warm air and are now standing on a windswept peak in a t-shirt and shorts at five o'clock in the morning. The sunrise from Adam's Peak is one of the great natural spectacles of South Asia. The eastern horizon glows gold, then orange, and then the sun breaks over the distant mountains. But the most remarkable phenomenon happens in the opposite direction. As the sun rises behind you, Adam's Peak casts an almost perfectly triangular shadow across the land to the west, a dark, sharp-edged pyramid of shadow stretching for miles across the hills and valley. The shadow is so precise and so dramatic and so unexpected that first-time visitors routinely gasp when they turn around and see it. It's called the Shadow of the Peak and it's only visible at sunrise and only from the summit, and to only those who climb 5,500 steps in the dark to see it. Pilgrims who regularly make the climb say the darkness is a mercy. It hides you from the mountains step by step until you're already too high to turn back. Number 3. The Manitou Incline, Colorado Springs. At the base of Pike's Peak in Colorado Springs, Colorado, there's a staircase that rises 200 feet in less than a mile, an average gradient of about 41%, with sections near the top exceeding 68%. The Manitou Incline is a set of about 2,700 railroad ties, the original wooden cross ties from a defunct railway, arranged in a near-vertical line up the eastern face of the mountain, and it's become one of the most popular and most punishing obsessively-repeated fitness challenges in the United States. The history of the incline is a story of engineering, abandonment, and accidental reinvention. In 1907, a cable car railway was built up there to build pipelines from the reservoirs above Manitou Springs. The railway was later converted into a tourist attraction, carrying passengers up the steep slope in a cable-hauled car. In 1990, a rock slide destroyed the upper section of the track and the railway was permanently closed. The rails were removed, but the railroad ties, hundreds of them, thick timber cross ties embedded in the mountain, were left in place. Hikers discovered the abandoned ties and started climbing them. And then the Manitou Incline was born, not as a planned attraction, but like a guerrilla fitness trail created by people who looked at an abandoned railway and thought, I bet I can climb that. The climb itself is brutally simple. You start at the bottom, and you climb. Duh. The railroad ties are spaced roughly 18 inches apart vertically. The angle of ascent means that each step is essentially a step up onto a platform at knee height or higher, and there are no switchbacks or flat sections. There's no shade up there. The altitude at the base is roughly 6,600 feet, and at the summit, it's 8,500 feet. The average completion time is about 45 minutes to an hour. Elite athletes have done it in under 17 minutes, which requires substantial vertical climbing speed. Some locals climb it every single day, and there's a community of incline regulars who track their ascent count, compete for fastest times, and treat the incline as a daily ritual. The current record holder has reportedly climbed it more than 5,000 times. Well, the descent is through the Bar Trail, a winding hiking path that switchbacks down the mountain at a far more civilized gradient. Almost nobody descends the incline itself, the ties are too steep and too slippery. Looking down the incline from the top, though, seeing the railroad ties dropping away in a near-vertical line, it's one of those moments where your brain performs a quick retroactive risk assessment and politely informs you that what you just did was, objectively speaking, insane. Number 2. The Huashan Heavenly Stairs in China Mount Hua, Huashan, is one of China's Five Great Mountains, sacred to Taoism for over 2,000 years, and it contains what is widely considered the single most terrifying set of stairs ever carved into a mountain. Not the Plank Walk, which gets most of the attention on social media. The Plank Walk is terrifying, yeah, but it's a boardwalk bolted to a cliff face, not a staircase. The truly heart-stopping feature of Huashan is the Heavenly Stairs, a near-vertical sequence of stone steps carved directly into the granite. These steps are essentially a stone ladder with chains bolted into the rock on either side, as the only thing preventing you from falling backward into several thousand feet of mountain air. The Heavenly Stairs is sometimes called the Stairway to Heaven, though several entries on this list claim that same name, consist roughly of 300 steps cut into a near-vertical rock face. The steps are narrow, some barely wider than a single boot, and they're worn smooth by centuries of foot traffic from Taoist pilgrims, monks, and modern people. The angle of ascent at the steepest sections approaches 90 degrees, meaning you're not so much climbing stairs as climbing a vertical surface that happens to have foot-shaped notches in it. Your hands are gripping the iron chains above you, your face is pressed against the cold granite, your feet are searching for each step below you without being able to see it, because looking down would require leaning backward away from the rock face, and leaning backward on the Heavenly Stairs is not something any survival instinct will permit. The chains there aren't optional, they're load-bearing, weight-supporting, they're life-preserving necessities, and without them, the Heavenly Stairs would be an uninsisted free-climb up a near-vertical granite wall. With them, though, the stairs are technically accessible to anyone with functional arms, reasonable fitness, and a willingness to ignore that part of their brain that is screaming for them to stop. They're bolted into the rock with iron stakes that have been there for centuries, they rattle in the wind, and they're cold in the On clear days, though, when you get up to the top, you can see for dozens of miles in every direction. Distant peaks, haze-filled valleys, and the faint outlines of towns and roads on the plains below. Huashan receives roughly three million visitors a year, and the majority of them climb at least some portion of the mountain's stair systems. The Heavenly Stairs are not the only frightening feature, the mountain is riddled with narrow paths and carved stone staircases, too. There is no camera angle that makes the Heavenly Stairs look safe, and there's no tourist infrastructure that softens the experience. It's just you, the stone, the chains, and the oldest, deepest, most fundamental question that a staircase can ask, do you trust the next step? 1. The Haiku Stairs, Hawaii On the island of Oahu, there's a staircase that climbs 3,922 steps from the valley floor to a summit of over 2,500 feet above sea level, a thin metal ladder of galvanized steel stairs bolted to a ridge rising through a tropical cloud forest. The staircase is called the Haiku Stairs, its unofficial name is the Stairway to Heaven, and it's being destroyed. The Haiku Stairs were originally built in 1942 by the United States Navy to provide access to a top-secret radio transmission station on the ridge above the Haiku Valley. The station was part of the military's Pacific Communication Network during the Second World War, and the stairs, originally wooden ladders bolted to the cliff, allowed personnel to climb from the valley floor to the antenna installation. After the war, the station was decommissioned, and the equipment was removed and the stairs were left in place, slowly deteriorating in the tropical rain and heat. In the late 1980s, the city and county of Honolulu partially renovated the stairs, replacing the old wooden ladders with galvanized steel steps and metal railings. They were closed again in 1987 due to liability and safety, the stairs crossed private land and they're exposed to high winds and heavy rain. Several sections traverse ridgelines so narrow that a misstep is going to be fatal, and the remoteness of the route means that rescue operations for injured or stranded hikers is dangerous, expensive, and time-consuming. The closure was enforced with security guards posted at the base of the stairs, fines for trespassers, and signs warning that climbing the Haiku stairs was illegal. None of that worked, the hikers kept coming. For over three decades, the stairs have been one of the most famous illegal hikes in the world. Thousands of people, tourists, locals, hikers, photographers, influencers, and adrenaline junkies have circumvented the security, evaded the guards, set out before dawn, and climbed the stairs under cover of darkness. The photos and videos they brought back though, shot from a knife-edge ridge with the clouds drifting below, the green valleys falling away on both sides, and the Pacific glittering in the distance. This is some of the best and most viral recognizable adventure travel images of the social media age. The stairway to heaven here became a bucket list destination for entire generations of hikers, and the fact that it was technically illegal only made it more desirable. The hike itself is genuinely dangerous. A 3,922 steps climb from a residential neighborhood in the valley and up through a dense tropical forest and onto a series of progressively narrower and more exposed ridgelines. The fog here can roll in suddenly, which reduces visibility to a few feet, to which will disorient climbers who are already struggling with vertigo and altitude. Winds at the exposed upper sections can be fierce enough to make standing on the stairs feel genuinely precarious, and the descent, which is always harder on stairs this steep, requires your full concentration because a slip on wet metal at the wrong moment could have consequences that no railing would prevent. In 2022, the Honolulu City Council voted to remove the Haiku Stairs permanently, citing decades of trespassing, legal liabilities, and neighborhood disruption. The removal began in April of 2024, and workers dismantled the stairs section by section, starting from the top, cutting the galvanized steel treads from the ridge, and helicoptering off the mountain. The staircase that was built by the Navy in 1942, that was climbed illegally by tens of thousands of hikers for over 30 years and produced some of the most breathtaking pictures ever taken, is gone. There is no replacing the Haiku Stairs. There never will be another staircase like them because no government agency, no insurance company in the modern world could ever approve construction of one. The Haiku Stairs existed because they were built in a different era, maintained by nobody, enclosed by the authorities, and kept alive by the stubbornness of hikers who just climbed them anyway. They're the scariest stairs on this list, not because they're the steepest or the highest or most exposed, but because they're the only ones that you're never going to be able to climb. The staircase that earned its name touched the clouds and then disappeared from the mountain forever. If you thought these were scary, you're not going to believe our video on the top 15 most scary elevators in the world. Click here to watch, and I'll see you over there!