Eiger, North Face
Tall vertical rock faces are simply – supremely powerful. I don’t mean a few hundred feet. I’m talking the world’s biggest vertical rock faces. Some more than a kilometer straight up.
Any ordinary person can climb a mild grade trail, or even the world’s steepest residential road.
Not many are drawn closer to the biggest rock faces. Most are content to see them from a comfortable distance. To most they inspire fear. To others they intrigue – to climb it, to fly from it, to fly around it. To land on it.
Ultimately they satisfy a deep core emotion.
Vertical Granite Faces (in no particular order):
I define a vertical rock face as one where a stone thrown from the top will not bounce off or away until it has dropped the full height listed here. “Near vertical” is a bit looser.
Yosemite’s famous Half Dome rises 4,700 feet above the valley floor and has about 2,000 feet of vertical granite.
Its big brother El Capitan rises about 3,200 feet above the valley floor and has a maximum of about 3,000 vertical feet of granite wall.
Norway’s Troll Wall is 5,300 feet above sea level and has about 3,600 vertical feet of wall – then tapers off gently to sea level.
Greenland’s Ketil wall has almost 4,000 feet of near vertical.
Mitre Peak, guarding New Zealand’s Milford Sound, has a 5,550 feet of near vertical granite face.
Pakistan’s Trango Towers rises vertically 4,400 feet and nearly vertically 5,700 feet above its base.
Baffin Island’s Mt Asgard’s vertical face is “only” 3,940 feet.
Baffin neighbor Mount Thor Peak has a granite face vertical drop of 4,101 feet.
Both are dwarfed by another Baffin neighbor Polar Sun Spire with 4,300 feet of vertical rock.
However, Ulvetanna in Antarctica sports a vertical wall of 5,740 feet 🙂
and the North face of the Eiger in Switzerland drops near vertically 5,905 feet.
# # #
