Top 10 Tallest Cliffs in the World

#1: Rupal Face, Nanga Parbat, Pakistan (vertical relief ≈15,090 ft; face length ≈2.7 mi)

Rupal Face isn’t just tall, it’s excessive—an almost absurd 15,000-foot wall of ice, rock, and mixed nightmares ripping down the south side of Nanga Parbat, the “Killer Mountain,” whose summit tops 26,660 feet; climbers describe craning their necks until it hurts, because the face keeps going and going until the sky finally says enough, and the psychological weight of that magnitude is as crushing as the physical altitude; first ascended in 1970 by a German-Austrian team after years of failed attempts and fatalities, the face has since been the scene of epics that read like Greek tragedies—storms that stalled for a week, avalanches the size of city blocks, bivouacs on ledges no wider than a pizza box, with temperatures plummeting to −40°F and the wind picking up spindrift that sandblasts exposed skin; imagine dropping from its crest straight to the Rupal Valley floor—nearly three miles of uninterrupted relief, more than twice the depth of the Grand Canyon—and you begin to understand why mountaineers debate whether a cliff this scale even fits normal definitions; geology explains the drama: the Himalaya are still being rammed up by India’s collision with Eurasia, stacking gneiss and granite into vertiginous slabs riddled with seracs poised like guillotines; hidden gems exist even here: alpine meadows in the lower Rupal Valley burst with wildflowers during the brief summer, their colors visible through binoculars from high camps, a surreal contrast to ice-sheathed ramparts above; Sherpa and local porters—Balti and Gurkha alike—carry loads toward Base Camp along goat paths that skirt thousands of feet of air, their quiet efficiency a rebuke to summit fever; a fun but unsettling fact: in 2005, Steve House soloed a new direct line on the face in just over a day—after years of preparation and an aerobic engine honed in the Rockies—proving speed can sometimes be the safest tactic on terrain where lingering is lethal; avalanches regularly erase entire route sections, so a climber studying last year’s beta might as well be reading ancient history; lightning storms often ricochet off the face, lighting up icefields like strobes, and there are whispers of phantom camp lights at night—more likely headlamps from other teams, but on a wall this vast, imagination steps in where oxygen steps out; at dawn the face glows salmon-pink for a few minutes, then hardens to steel gray, and in that brief color shift you see time: another day the mountain will win, and another day someone will step onto the summit ridge and say, softly, “Down. We still have to get down.”

#2: Great Trango Tower, Pakistan (east face vertical drop ≈4,396 ft; summit 20,623 ft)

The east face of Great Trango Tower is a granite guillotine—4,396 feet of near-vertical to overhanging armor plating above the dizzying Dunge Glacier, a drop so clean that BASE jumpers in 1992 leapt from the summit and fell for almost 20 seconds before canopy, a human exclamation mark on one of Earth’s fiercest pieces of rock; sitting in the Baltoro Massif among a forest of spires that look like dragon teeth, Great Trango’s bulk is deceptive—its summit sits at over 20,000 feet, so the air is thin, your pack feels twice as heavy, and every move on a tiny granite edge taxes lungs already bargaining for oxygen; the 1984 Norwegian ascent of the east face, a 57-pitch siege through storms and verglas, ended with a harrowing descent gone wrong and fatalities that turned triumph into elegy, reminding the community that walls of this magnitude demand humility; climbers today still debate what “pure style” means up here—fixed ropes versus alpine blitzes, portaledges versus hanging hammocks, drones filming versus respecting the silence—and every season seems to add a new line scratched into guidebooks that read more like epitaphs; the granite itself is flawlessly bad: splitter cracks that swallow entire racks, flakes that ring like bells (some of them hollow), and occasional exfoliation plates that detach with a gunshot crack and scythe through nothingness; hidden in its shadow are simpler miracles: snow finches that hop nonchalantly on ropes at high bivy ledges, glacial meltwater trickling in tiny rills that become lifesavers for dehydrated teams, and a clear night sky so brutal in its brilliance you almost forget your toes are freezing; Great Trango’s bulk also funnels weather—the Karakoram’s notorious afternoon build-ups slam into it and explode into electrical storms, bolts stepping down the face in lazy blue arcs that would awe Thor; geologically, you’re touching batholiths cooled from magma bodies millions of years old, now uplifted and scraped clean by glaciers that still ooze below like patient conveyor belts; a stat that blows minds: the combined relief from summit to valley floor exceeds 10,000 feet in places, meaning a bird could dive from the top and still be above treeline when it pulls up; and yet, despite its fearsome rep, local Balti guides tell stories of kids hauling goats along ledges that would paralyze a sport climber, proof that familiarity can domesticate even dragons; for those who stand beneath it in Base Camp, craning up at an overhanging skyline that seems to lean toward them, Great Trango is a lesson: the planet builds monoliths not for us to conquer, but to remind us of scale.

#3: Mount Thor, Baffin Island, Canada (vertical drop 4,101 ft at 105° overhang; summit 5,495 ft)

If Mount Thor had an Instagram bio, it would just say “World’s greatest vertical drop. Also, I lean backward.” Its 4,101-foot granite west face in Auyuittuq National Park not only plunges more than three-quarters of a mile but overhangs at an average of 105 degrees, meaning toss a rock from the top and it won’t kiss the wall until far below; Arctic conditions add menace: katabatic winds scream down Akshayuk Pass like freight trains, temperatures yo-yo from pleasant to bone-numbing in a few hours, and mosquitoes appear in biblical swarms during brief summers, turning even a casual hike to the base into a blood donation; the rock is granite polished by Ice Age glaciers into sweeping slabs and corners, and climbers describe pitches where fingers jam in flaring cracks while a 3,000-foot void yawns beneath, concentration taxed by the hum of wind like a distant jet; in 2006, a French team set a world record BASE jump off Thor, freefalling 3,681 feet before opening chutes, an achievement that made the wall famous beyond climbing circles; Inuit lore doesn’t focus on Thor (a modern name), but the landscape—fjords, glaciers, caribou routes—has been navigated for millennia, and you can still find stone tent rings on gravel bars where Arctic char flip in crystalline streams; hidden gem: the midnight sun casting an orange glow on the wall so it looks aflame, even as shadows pool in crevasses nearby, creating a painterly chiaroscuro unmatched in lower latitudes; stats that stun: the approach from Pangnirtung involves 40+ miles of trekking across moraines and river fords—one climber recounted carrying inflatable rafts just to ferry loads across meltwater torrents that double in volume by afternoon; geologists note Thor’s face is part of the Canadian Shield’s ancient core, a chunk of crust more than 2 billion years old, exhumed and sculpted into modern drama; the National Park requires visitors to rent bear-proof food canisters—not for polar bears (rare here) but for Arctic foxes and gulls that have learned the art of theft; when storms roll in, clouds pinwheel around Thor’s summit like time-lapse films of galaxies forming, and every climber huddles tighter in portaledges trembling to wind gusts; you can sit at the base on a calm day, listen to meltwater trickle, look straight up at an overhanging sky of stone, and feel a rare thing: gravity pulling down, and awe pulling up.

#4: Kalaupapa Sea Cliffs, Molokaʻi, Hawaiʻi, USA (≈3,315 ft sheer drop; cliff line ≈4 mi long)

On Molokaʻi’s north shore, the Kalaupapa sea cliffs explode vertically from the Pacific—3,315 feet of emerald ramparts streaked with waterfalls that freefall hundreds of feet before atomizing into rainbow mist; these are among the tallest sea cliffs on Earth, a product of shield volcano flanks collapsing in mega-landslides hundreds of thousands of years ago, leaving behind amphitheaters that the ocean has since gnawed into sheer curtains; visitors once zigzagged a mule trail down 26 switchbacks to the Kalaupapa Peninsula, where Father Damien ministered to the leper colony beginning in 1873—a world within a world, isolated by policy and geology—but that path has been closed repeatedly by rockfalls that remind everyone the cliffs are still shedding; flying in on a small prop plane, the first sight of those walls rising from cobalt water is a gut punch, a Jurassic fever dream that makes the cabin go quiet as cameras fumble for focus; hidden gem: during winter swells, waves smash into the base with explosions that shoot plumes halfway up the face, giving you a sense of scale you miss from above; feral goats hop ledges that would terrify mountain bikers, and endemic plants cling to micro-ledges, each niche a botanic island; anecdote: in 2008, a pilot guided his glider so close to the wall he could feel its thermal lift, riding invisible escalators created by wind ramming up the basalt; the cliffs’ lava layers are a library of eruptions, thick pāhoehoe and ‘a‘ā flows stacked like lasagna, now weathered into fluted buttresses streaked with orange lichens; Kalaupapa’s human story is sobering—patients exiled for Hansen’s disease built lives under that wall’s shadow, and today a handful still choose to remain, their quiet dignity contrasted against the dramatic setting that once imprisoned them; waterfalls like Kahiwa drop over 1,700 feet in segmented leaps, appearing and vanishing with rains, and choppers often hover in spray clouds for tourists craning necks out open doors; in the evening, the cliffs purpling against a silver Pacific, frigatebirds scything the air, you realize this isn’t just height—it’s height weaponized by ocean, culture, and time.

#5: Drakensberg Amphitheatre, South Africa/Lesotho (wall ≈3,280 ft high; Tugela Falls drop 3,110 ft)

The Drakensberg Amphitheatre is a five-mile-wide basalt escarpment where the Great Escarpment of southern Africa flexes its muscles, a near-vertical curtain rising about 3,280 feet from the Tugela Valley, with Tugela Falls—at 3,110 feet, among the tallest on Earth—pouring over its lip like liquid glass in the wet season; the word “amphitheatre” feels apt when you stand below: basalt columns stacked in tiered rows, acoustics that bounce baboon barks and Zulu songs, and a stage where thunderstorms perform almost daily in summer, lightning conducting through iron-rich rock; hikers ascend via the infamous chain ladders near Sentinel Peak—vertical steel rungs bolted into rock faces that sway ever so slightly, prompting nervous laughter and white knuckles, while Basotho herders watch from above with unconcerned sheep; stories from the 1800s tell of San (Bushman) hunters painting eland and trance dances in caves tucked under the escarpment, their ochre figures still visible if you know where to duck under overhangs dripping stalactites; geologically, the cliffs are Jurassic flood basalts intruded by dolerite dikes, remnants of Gondwana’s breakup when Africa began to drift away from South America, and that ancient violence is now eroded into castle-like buttresses and pinnacles like the Devil’s Tooth; winter brings snow to the rim while grasslands below bake golden, a 30°F temperature gradient you can hike in a single day, shedding layers like a reptile; hidden gem: sunrise from the top, where the shadow of the escarpment stretches west across the Free State like someone pulled a blackout curtain, and a sea of clouds often pools below, making peaks look like islands; vultures—Cape and bearded—ride thermals along the face, their 9-foot wingspans dwarfed by the wall as they circle in effortless spirals, while rock climbers tackle long trad routes on basalt that can be both bomber and heartbreakingly loose; wartime lore lurks too: British and Boer scouts used the escarpment as a lookout and barrier during the Anglo-Boer Wars, long before GPS plotted every contour; stand at the Tugela lip, peer over into wind so strong it can strip your hat, see the river begin as a trickle and then leap to oblivion, and you appreciate how a cliff can be both origin and ending, cradle and precipice, in a single stone line.

#6: Kjerag Cliff, Lysefjord, Norway (sheer drop ≈3,228 ft; Kjeragbolten wedged boulder size ~16 ft)

Kjerag’s granite wall plummets 3,228 feet almost straight into the glassy waters of Lysefjord, a fjord carved by Pleistocene glaciers that left behind U-shaped valleys now flooded by the North Sea, and on a calm day the reflection doubles the void, tricking your brain into thinking the world has no bottom; the cliff is infamous for Kjeragbolten, a 16-foot boulder wedged between two faces with a drop of nearly 1,000 feet yawning beneath—tourists shuffle onto it for that viral photo, legs jelly but grins wide, and every season park rangers lecture about not doing it in icy conditions (which, being Norway, is a lot of conditions); BASE jumpers swarm here in summer, leaping into air so clean their wingsuits hum, with riggers timing exits to avoid boat traffic below because the splash zone is also a busy sightseeing corridor; the hike up is a calf-burner: chains bolted into slick granite slabs assist as you swing across boulder fields dotted with sheep that seem unimpressed by humans in neon shells; hidden gem: stand on the plateau during a temperature inversion and fog fills Lysefjord like dry ice in a stage show, the cliff edge emerging like the prow of a ship over clouds; Lysefjord translates to “Light Fjord,” hinting at the pale granite walls that glow in low-angle sun, each glacial striation and chatter mark catching shadows that look like claw marks; geologically the cliff is part of Norway’s Southwest Caledonides, ancient crust metamorphosed and then planed down by ice, leaving joints and cracks that water pries open in winter freezes, sending down occasional house-sized blocks that boom across the fjord like artillery; an anecdote: in 2016, a hiker dropped his phone which slid toward the edge and miraculously snagged on a grass tuft, a millimeter from a 3,000-foot fall—retrieval involved a guy dangling from a buddy’s ankles in mountain rescue improvisation that would make OSHA faint; goats once grazed the ledges, ferried by boat and winch, an agricultural quirk that feels like folklore but is fact; when wind funnels up the fjord it turns the drop into a vertical wind tunnel, blasting tears sideways and making a yell vanish into white noise, a reminder that sound behaves differently when there’s nothing to catch it.

#7: El Capitan, Yosemite Valley, California, USA (granite face ≈3,000 ft; Nose route ≈2,900 ft)

El Capitan is America’s granite cathedral—3,000 feet of monolithic El Capitan Granite rising in a single sweep from Yosemite Valley’s meadows, a face so sheer climbers once laughed at Warren Harding’s plan to bolt his way up in 1958, only to watch him and team top out after 45 days of siege tactics, wine bottles, and a Christmas Eve finish by headlamp; the Nose, that elegant prow, now goes free in 3,000 feet of continuous 5.13 climbing thanks to Lynn Hill’s 1993 “It goes, boys,” ascent, and speed records—most recently under 2 hours—turn the vertical marathon into a sprint, Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell simulclimbing where average parties bivy for nights, an athletic theater visible from picnic tables below where tourists crane with binoculars; the cliff is a glacially polished intrusion of a granitic pluton, riddled with dikes, flakes, and splitter cracks that swallow cams like candy, and if you press your ear to the rock you can hear microfractures ping under heat stress on summer afternoons; hidden gem: the Horsetail Fall “Firefall” each February when sunset lights the trickle into molten orange, a natural event that echoes the old (and stupid) man-made Firefall of burning embers pushed off Glacier Point; geologists argue over the exact role of exfoliation joints in creating El Cap’s clean faces, but everyone agrees gravity still works—rockfalls in 2017 shaved off a chunk the size of an apartment building, dusting climbers with debris but miraculously sparing lives; ravens cruise the wall looking for unattended food in haulbags, unzipping zippers with beaks honed by generations of opportunism, adding black comedy to big-wall logistics; Native American Ahwahneechee oral histories speak of spirits in the cliffs and of respect for the valley’s stone guardians, an ethos climbers now echo with Leave No Trace and poop-tube protocols that keep the wall from turning into a latrine; anecdotes accumulate: a wedding on El Cap ledge, a piano hauled halfway up in the ’70s and left because reality set in, a guy paragliding off after topping out until the Park Service said nope; at night, headlamps sparkle like a constellation strung across the face, and in early morning the first sunbeam hits the summit and slides down like a curtain rise, revealing once again that the “Cap” isn’t a rock, it’s a ritual.

#8: Notch Peak, Utah, USA (sheer west face ≈2,200 ft; summit 9,658 ft)

Notch Peak looms over Utah’s West Desert like a limestone battleship, its west face dropping about 2,200 feet in a nearly unbroken sheet—one of the tallest pure limestone cliffs in North America—rising from salt flats where mirages shimmer and pronghorn flicker like ghosts; the approach weaves through Tule Canyon’s pinyon-juniper slopes before a high saddle opens suddenly to the abyss, a shock transition from enclosed trail to edge so abrupt it can jolt even seasoned hikers backward; its Cambrian carbonate layers are loaded with trilobite fossils—sea creatures from half a billion years ago embedded in what is now sky—and fossil hunters can (legally in some spots) pick up shed shells yards from where base jumpers gear up; climbers tackling the Beckey Route (named for legendary dirtbag Fred Beckey) describe chossy sections where every hold is suspect, a far cry from Yosemite’s bomber granite, making protection as psychological as physical; hidden gem: on summer evenings, thermal updrafts carry turkey vultures past at eye level, their dihedral wings steady as they surf invisible rivers of hot air rising off sun-baked cliffs; jet pilots from nearby test ranges buzz the peak, looping beneath the rim while hikers above blink in disbelief at F-16s below, an inversion of normal flight hierarchies that triggers instinctive ducking; the desert below was once Lake Bonneville shore—ancient strandlines etched into hillsides—and when wind kicks up it can carry saline dust through the canyon, stinging eyes and adding a taste of salt 100 miles from the Great Salt Lake; geologists marvel at the House Range’s uplift, a fault-block tilted so steeply you can read Earth’s pages like a slanted book, with Notch’s cliff the boldface chapter; winter snows turn the rim into cornice country, and careless steps have broken off giant blocks with whomps that echo for seconds; nights here are so dark the Milky Way throws shadows, and campers report coyotes singing duets from canyon mouths, their calls bouncing off limestone amphitheaters in ghostly stereo; Notch Peak is a study in contrasts: slickrock floor to alpine rim in a few miles, ancient ocean to modern aridity, utter silence punctuated by jet thunder, and the human mind toggling between terror and wonder at a stone edge that does not forgive.

#9: Cape Enniberg, Viðoy, Faroe Islands (sea cliff ≈2,507 ft; nearly vertical for 1,500+ ft)

Cape Enniberg rears off Viðoy’s northern tip like the prow of a sinking continent—2,507 feet of grassy-topped basalt plunging straight into the North Atlantic, making it one of Europe’s highest sea cliffs and a guano-slicked apartment complex for puffins, fulmars, and guillemots; boats circle below in summer, their passengers swaddled in waterproofs as spray slaps faces and guides point out “witches’ fingers”—eroded stacks jutting offshore like spells mid-cast—while above, sheep graze with suicidal nonchalance, their hoofprints tracing vertigo-inducing paths locals use to collect seabird eggs in traditions older than many European states; the subarctic weather is feral—fog banks swallow the cape without warning, winds whip spindrift off wave tops, and rain can fall horizontally—so the Faroe Islanders’ folklore is soaked in cautionary tales of fishermen and eggers lost to a single misstep; hidden gem: on rare calm evenings, bioluminescent plankton ignite in breakers below, turning the base of the cliff into a neon pulse visible from high vantage points, a rave in the surf no human can attend; geologically, Enniberg is part of thick basalt flows laid down during the opening of the North Atlantic 60 million years ago, now jointed into columns and weakened by freeze-thaw cycles that periodically calve house-sized boulders, adding more rubble to talus fans underwater; anecdote: in WWII, British radar outposts used Faroese promontories like Enniberg as natural towers, scanning for German subs in the GIUK gap—proof that a cliff can be both hazard to ships and ally in war; a statistic that raises eyebrows: the drop is so abrupt that seabirds nesting halfway up can launch straight into gusts, catching wind like kites, while predators like rats struggle to reach upper ledges—an evolutionary boon for eggs; hiking to the top requires permission from landowners (a hallmark of Faroese respect for turf) and involves crossing boggy heath that soaks boots even in “dry” spells; stand near the edge on a day when sun pierces cloud holes and you’ll see the ocean shift from slate to emerald to midnight blue in seconds, the kind of chromatic mood swing only sheer depth and sudden light allow; here, at a latitude where summer nights barely get dark, cliffs like Enniberg feel eternal, yet every winter storm scribbles a new line in the ledger of loss.

#10: Caroline Face, Aoraki/Mount Cook, New Zealand (face ≈6,000 ft high; summit 12,218 ft)

New Zealand’s highest peak hides a monster on its southeast flank: the Caroline Face, a 6,000-foot ice-and-rock wall on Aoraki/Mount Cook that avalanches so frequently pilots give it a wide berth and climbers historically eyed it like a dare best left unaccepted—until 1970 when Bill Denz and John Glasgow sneaked a line in winter, triggering slides they somehow dodged; unlike granite monoliths, Caroline is a living thing: seracs the size of office buildings teeter all season, cornices peel off like pastry, and new crevasses spiderweb across the face after every storm, wiping out tracks within hours; falling ice blocks explode like depth charges on the Linda Glacier below, and stories circulate of tents lofted off by slide-induced air blasts, climbers waking midair in a swirl of spindrift and nylon; metrics aside—6,000 feet of continuous hazard—the psychological tax is the kicker: you move at night when cold supposedly glues the place together, timing steps between groans and cracks, your headlamp cone the only certainty in a world of white; hidden gem: from the Tasman Glacier flats at dusk, the Caroline Face turns alpenglow pink then a cold, deadly blue, a beauty so crisp it hides the sound of constant icefall thuds echoing like distant artillery; Māori regard Aoraki as a sacred ancestor turned to stone, his body lying where canoes overturned in legend, and that cosmology infuses the place with a gravity beyond mass and meters; the face wasn’t fully skied until 2017 when a trio threaded a line in perfect spring conditions, leapfrogging hazards in a fluid ballet that seemed to defy risk math; geologists explain that the Southern Alps are rising fast—about 0.4 inches per year—thanks to the Pacific and Australian plates grinding, but simultaneous erosion means the peaks are also melting away, making Caroline a transient sculpture in a high-speed sandblaster; nearby huts like Plateau and Gardiner serve as storm prisons where parties wait days for weather windows, swapping yarns, drying socks over sputtering stoves, and carving new initials into tables already scarred with decades of restless patience; helicopters whoop in to pick up guided parties off safer routes, their rotor wash kicking avalanched snow plumes, while those on Caroline know their only ticket out is good judgment and a lot of luck; when you finally stand on the summit ridge, the Tasman Sea glints to the west, the Pacific to the east, and below your crampon points the face slides away in an icy narrative of ambition, caution, and the rawest kind of gravity.

From Pakistan’s murderous walls to Hawaiʻi’s waterfall-laced sea cliffs, from Norwegian fjord edges threaded with boulders to New Zealand’s collapsing ice armor, the world’s tallest cliffs aren’t just measurements, they’re experiences shaped by geology, climate, culture, and the stubborn human itch to peer over the edge. Their drops are counted in feet, but their true depth lies in the stories—of first ascents and last letters, of goats on ledges and BASE jumpers in freefall, of fossils high above deserts and avalanches that write new routes overnight. In a world mapped to the millimeter by satellites, these vertical frontiers remain defiantly three-dimensional: they demand presence, respect, and a steady hand on whatever—or whoever—you’re holding.