If you’re in good shape and a decent hiker, you could do it even faster. With an average hiking speed of 2 miles an hour, plus 30 minutes for every 1,000 feet of elevation, the hike from the base of Mount Doom to the door in the cinder cone would take around 4 hours, conservatively. And given the diameter and the average slope, they would’ve covered 3.5 miles or so to get there. The entrance to Sauron’s Sammath Naur (“Chambers of Fire”) is “high in the upper cone but still far from the reeking summit”, which probably puts it near the 4,000-foot mark. Not to mention, Frodo and Sam didn’t have to hike all the way to the top. Most hikers consider anything less that 30 degrees “easy.” You wouldn’t need switchbacks at that angle, making a shorter, direct approach possible. That’s even shallower than Mount Fuji‘s gentle Kawaguchiko trail (21.6 degrees). Mount Doom’s diameter was 7 miles at the base, meaning the average slope was only 20 degrees. Even the volcano used as a stand-in for Mount Doom in The Lord of the Rings film series, New Zealand’s Mount Ngauruhoe, is 3,000 feet taller than Tolkien describes.īut elevation isn’t the only reason Frodo and Sam had it easy. Mount Kilimanjaro, for instance, is over 19,000 feet, and Italy’s other famous volcano, Mount Etna, is nearly 11,000. That’s about the same size as Mount Vesuvius, the infamous stratovolcano in Italy that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD.Īs far as volcanoes go, 4,500 feet is actually quite small. So 3,000 feet for the shoulders, and another 1,500 feet for the cinder cone, equaling 4,500 feet from base to summit. The confused and tumbled shoulders of its great base rose for maybe three thousand feet above the plain, and above them was reared half as high again its tall central cone . Tolkien was very specific about Mount Doom’s height in The Return of the King: Frodo and Sam’s final hike, while certainly no walk in the park, wasn’t exactly a daring feat of mountaineering prowess, either. Turns out, the towering volcano where the One Ring was forged…isn’t all that towering, after all.
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