The most famous cliff figure you have heard is probably not on this list. Nanga Parbat's Rupal Face rises 4,600 m and holds the Guinness record for the tallest mountain face on Earth, but it is a flank of snow and ice rather than a wall of rock. Nor does the Eiger's Nordwand qualify, half of it ice, nor Hawaii's Kalaupapa, a vegetated sea slope with its own Guinness record. Everything below is measured one way only: the height of continuous exposed rock, from the ground at the base of the face to the top of the wall. That runs from 1,600 m down to 670 m across ten countries, and every wall still stands. Two things worth knowing. These heights are rounded by the sources that publish them, so several walls share a figure; where they tie, the one whose summit stands higher above sea level ranks first. And tallest is not the same as sheerest, which is why the record for the tallest near-vertical face belongs to number two rather than number one.
15 Tallest Cliffs in the World (2026)
The record The tallest cliff in the world is Mount Dickey, in the United States — 1,600 m (5,249 ft), rock wall height. Source: Wikipedia; American Alpine Journal. Verified .
Tallest Cliffs in the World The Ranking at a Glance
Fun Facts About the World's Tallest Cliffs
- The tallest cliff in the solar system is not on Earth — Verona Rupes, a fault scarp on Miranda, a moon of Uranus, stands roughly 20 km high.
- Mount Thor leans out as it rises — the west face of Mount Thor overhangs at an average 105 degrees, so a stone dropped from the top falls the full 1,250 m without touching rock.
- The biggest face on the planet is not a cliff at all — Nanga Parbat's Rupal Face rises 4,600 m and holds the Guinness record for tallest mountain face, but it is a flank of snow and ice rather than a wall of rock.
- One of these walls went unclimbed until 2022 — Ingmikortilaq in eastern Greenland was among the largest unclimbed rock faces anywhere until Alex Honnold and Hazel Findlay reached its top.
- A rockfall can erase a climbing route — in 2005 the southwest Bonatti Pillar of the Aiguille du Dru collapsed, taking two of the most celebrated climbs in the Alps down with it.
- Hawaii holds the sea-cliff record — Kalaupapa on Molokai is recognised by Guinness at 1,010 m, but its slopes are vegetated rather than sheer rock, which is why it does not appear on this list.
1. Mount Dickey
At roughly 1,600 m of granite, near enough a vertical mile, the east face of Mount Dickey is the tallest rock wall on this list and one of the tallest anywhere. What makes the number so startling is how little ground it covers: the face gains that height in under 800 m of horizontal distance, rearing straight out of the Ruth Gorge in Denali National Park. Dickey's summit is a modest 2,909 m, which tells you how deep the gorge beneath it runs.
It is also the entry that best illustrates this list's one rule. Dickey is taller than anything below it but leans back more than the sheer towers at numbers two and three, so it wins on height without winning on steepness. Climbers reach it by ski plane from Talkeetna, and the face has absorbed some of Alaska's hardest routes, among them Blood from the Stone, put up by Sean Easton and Ueli Steck in 2002 and not repeated for twenty-one years.
2. Great Trango Tower
The 1,340 m east face of Great Trango Tower is the tallest nearly vertical rock face on Earth, and it is the wall most climbers mean when they argue about the biggest cliff in the world. Height alone puts it second here, but no other wall combines this much rock with this little lean. It stands above the Baltoro Glacier in Pakistan's Karakoram, its summit at 6,286 m, in a cluster of granite spires that also includes the Nameless Tower.
Getting a look at it is easier than climbing it. The Baltoro trek to K2 base camp passes directly beneath the Trango group, and the towers are the walk's visual centrepiece long before the eight-thousanders come into view. The east face has been climbed only a handful of times, and descents from it are as committing as the ascents, with more than a kilometre of overhanging rock to rappel.
3. Bhagirathi III
Bhagirathi III's west face is 1,300 m high and, in the words of the Himalayan Journal, mostly overhanging, which makes it one of the steepest big walls on the planet as well as one of the largest. It shares its figure with the two entries below, and takes the higher rank because its summit stands at 6,454 m, far above theirs. The peak sits in the Garhwal Himalaya of Uttarakhand, in the Bhagirathi massif above the Gangotri Glacier.
The face was climbed in 1990 by the Slovenian pair Janez Jeglic and Silvo Karo, who took the central line between an existing Spanish route on the left ridge and a Scottish route on the right. They climbed alpine style over six days with five bivouacs, much of it hanging beneath smooth overhanging plates. Trekkers walking the Gangotri to Tapovan route get a long look at the massif without setting foot on it.
4. Cerro Escudo
Cerro Escudo rises 1,300 m above the Valley of Silence in about half a kilometre of horizontal distance, which is the sort of ratio that turns a mountain into a wall. It ties with the entry above and the one below on height; its summit elevation of 2,420 m places it in the middle of the three. The peak stands in Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia, behind the better-known towers that give the park its name.
What separates Escudo from the other giants here is the weather. Patagonian storms arrive off the Southern Patagonian Ice Field with almost no warning and can pin climbers on the wall for days, so ascents tend to be siege affairs rather than the fast alpine pushes that work in the Karakoram. Walkers on the park's W and O circuits pass through the same valleys, and the Valley of Silence sits at the end of a demanding approach beyond the Torres viewpoint.
5. Polar Sun Spire
The north face of Polar Sun Spire is a 1,300 m sweep of granite standing over Sam Ford Fjord on Baffin Island, the third of the three walls on this list to carry that figure and the lowest-summited of them, which is what places it here. It is also the least visited of the three, in a fjord system that sees a handful of expeditions in a good year and none in a bad one.
Sam Ford Fjord holds one of the densest concentrations of big walls anywhere, and Polar Sun Spire is its centrepiece. Access is by snowmobile and sled from the community of Clyde River, several hours across the sea ice, which means the climbing season is dictated by the ice being solid enough to travel on and the rock being warm enough to touch. The window between those two conditions is narrow.
6. Mount Thor
Mount Thor's west face is 1,250 m tall and holds a record none of the walls above it can take: the greatest purely vertical drop on Earth. The face does not merely stand up, it leans out, overhanging at an average angle of 105 degrees, so a stone dropped from the top lands well clear of the base. The peak itself reaches only 1,675 m, on Baffin Island in Nunavut.
Thor sits inside Auyuittuq National Park, and unlike most walls on this list it can be seen without a climbing rack. The Akshayuk Pass route through the park passes beneath it, reached from the hamlet of Pangnirtung, and the mountain is the reason many people walk in at all. It is a serious Arctic trek rather than a day hike, with river crossings and no facilities, but it brings the overhanging wall within reach on foot.
7. Ingmikortilaq
Ingmikortilaq rises around 1,140 m straight out of the water of Nordvestfjord in eastern Greenland, which makes it one of the tallest sea cliffs on Earth as well as one of the tallest rock walls. Until very recently it was among the largest rock faces anywhere that nobody had climbed.
That changed in August 2022, when Alex Honnold and Hazel Findlay made the first ascent as part of an expedition that combined the climb with glaciological fieldwork. The wall stands deep inside the Scoresby Sund fjord system, the largest fjord network in the world, and reaching it means a long boat journey through water that is only ice-free for part of the year. It remains, by any measure, one of the least accessible entries on this list.
8. Trollveggen
Trollveggen, the Troll Wall, measures about 1,100 m from its base to the summit of its highest point, making it the tallest vertical rock face in Europe. At its steepest the summit ridge overhangs the base by nearly 50 m, and the top of the wall is a serrated line of pinnacles that gives the formation its name. It stands in Romsdalen in western Norway, part of the Trolltindene ridge.
This is the most easily seen wall on the list after El Capitan. The E136 road runs along the valley floor beneath it, and there is a marked viewpoint where the whole face is visible from the car park. The wall was a magnet for BASE jumping in the 1980s until a series of fatal accidents led Norwegian authorities to prohibit jumps from it, a ban that remains in place.
9. Aiguille du Dru
The Aiguille du Dru carries 1,000 m rock faces on its north and west sides, sharing that figure with the two entries below and taking the higher rank on the strength of its 3,754 m summit. The mountain is a pair of granite spires, the Grand Dru and the slightly lower Petit Dru, standing above the Mer de Glace in the Mont Blanc massif near Chamonix.
The Dru is the entry that best demonstrates that a cliff is not a permanent thing. In 2005 a major rockfall stripped the southwest Bonatti Pillar off the mountain, taking with it one of the most celebrated rock climbs in the Alps and the American Direttissima route alongside it. The scars are still clearly visible from the Chamonix valley, and the Montenvers rack railway carries visitors to a viewpoint facing the wall without any need to climb.
10. Monte Civetta
The north-west face of Monte Civetta is a 1,000 m cliff and one of the defining images of the Dolomites, a pale limestone wall that catches the evening light above the Alleghe valley. It ties on height with the Dru above and Great Sail Peak below, and its 3,220 m summit sets its position between them. The mountain stands in the province of Belluno in the Veneto.
Civetta's wall has a longer climbing history than almost anything else on this list, having drawn alpinists since the nineteenth century, and its routes helped define what hard rock climbing meant in the Alps. Walkers get the best of it for far less effort: the Alta Via 1 long-distance route passes directly beneath the north-west face, and a chairlift from Alleghe lifts day visitors to viewpoints looking straight at it.
11. Great Sail Peak
Great Sail Peak's north-west wall is given as roughly 1,000 m by the American Alpine Journal, though other sources put it as high as 1,150 m, and this list takes the more conservative figure. It is the lowest-summited of the three walls tied on this height, at 1,617 m, which places it last of the three. The peak stands in Stewart Valley, an ancient fjord on eastern Baffin Island.
The wall came to wider attention in 1998, when a National Geographic expedition including Mark Synnott, Alex Lowe, Greg Child and Jared Ogden made the first ascent after deliberately stranding themselves for a month with no way out until the sea ice broke up. The rock is granite shot through with diorite, feldspar and mica. In 2016 Brette Harrington, Joshua Lavigne and Marc-Andre Leclerc added two further routes over a six-week trip.
12. Kjerag
Kjerag drops 984 m almost straight down to Lysefjorden, and of all the walls on this list it is the one most people have actually stood on top of. The summit plateau reaches 1,132 m, and the cliff edge is reached by a well-trodden hiking route rather than a rope, which is why it draws crowds no other entry here comes close to matching.
The reason most of them come is Kjeragbolten, a boulder wedged in a cleft above roughly a kilometre of open air, which people queue to stand on for a photograph. The hike starts from Oygardstolen above Lysebotn in Rogaland and is a demanding day out with chain-assisted sections, not a stroll. Kjerag is also one of the world's best-known BASE jumping sites, with tens of thousands of registered jumps since 1994 and a sobering accident record to go with them.
13. El Capitan
El Capitan rises about 914 m from base to summit along its tallest face, and while that places it thirteenth here, no wall on the list is more famous or more studied. The granite monolith stands at the western end of Yosemite Valley in California, and its scale is genuinely hard to read from below because there is nothing beside it to judge it against.
What sets El Capitan apart from everything above it is access. You can drive to a meadow at its foot, and on any given day in season you can watch climbers moving on routes like the Nose through a spotting scope. That combination of size and visibility is why it became the proving ground for big wall climbing, and why the achievements on it, from the first ascents of the 1950s to modern ropeless climbing, reached audiences far outside the sport.
14. Tsaranoro
The east face of Mount Tsaranoro is up to 800 m high and around two kilometres long, a sweep of hard granite that is the largest big wall in Africa and the reason climbers travel to Madagascar at all. It rises from the grassland of the Tsaranoro valley near Andringitra National Park in the island's south, and the rock is unusually compact, offering long stretches with very few cracks.
The massif is really a group of formations rather than one, with Tsaranoro Be, Tsaranoro Kely and Karambony all carrying substantial faces, though the 800 m east face of the main peak is the largest. The setting does a lot of the work: lemurs live in the forest at the base, the approach runs through villages rather than glaciers, and the climbing season falls in the southern winter when the weather is dry.
15. Notch Peak
Notch Peak's north face falls 670 m, which makes it the highest carbonate rock cliff in North America and the second-greatest pure vertical drop in the United States after El Capitan. The summit stands at 2,944 m in the House Range of western Utah, in country so empty that the nearest town of any size is an hour away.
It is the most accessible entry on this list in one sense and the least visited in another. A rough road reaches Sawtooth Canyon and a steep unmaintained route leads to the top, so a fit walker can stand at the edge of the drop in a day, yet the peak sees a tiny fraction of the traffic Kjerag or El Capitan attract. Ancient bristlecone pines grow near the summit, and the view west runs out over the salt flats towards Nevada.
FAQ: The World's Tallest Cliffs
What is the tallest cliff in the world?
Measured as continuous exposed rock from the base of the face to the top of the wall, it is the east face of Mount Dickey in Alaska, at roughly 1,600 m. Great Trango Tower in Pakistan is shorter at 1,340 m but much steeper, and holds the record for the tallest nearly vertical rock face on Earth.
Is Nanga Parbat's Rupal Face the tallest cliff in the world?
It is the tallest mountain face, a Guinness record at 4,600 m, but not the tallest cliff. Rupal is a flank of snow and ice rather than a wall of rock, so lists of cliffs and big walls leave it out. The two records measure genuinely different things.
Which cliff has the greatest vertical drop?
Mount Thor on Baffin Island. Its 1,250 m west face overhangs at an average of 105 degrees, so a stone dropped from the summit falls the entire height without touching rock. That gives it the greatest purely vertical drop on Earth, even though three walls on this list are taller.
Can you visit any of the world's tallest cliffs without climbing?
Yes, several. Kjerag and Trollveggen in Norway both have marked routes to viewpoints, El Capitan is visible from a roadside meadow in Yosemite Valley, and Notch Peak in Utah can be walked in a long day. Most of the rest need a full expedition to reach at all.
What is the tallest sea cliff in the world?
Ingmikortilaq in eastern Greenland rises around 1,140 m straight out of the water of Nordvestfjord. Guinness separately recognises Kalaupapa on Molokai, Hawaii, at 1,010 m as the tallest sea cliffs, but its slopes are vegetated rather than sheer rock, so the answer depends on what you count as a cliff.
Planning more of your trip? Keep exploring more world record-breakers.