By the best published counts, the most climbed mountains in the world are Mount Tai in China, which drew about six million visitors in 2003, Mount Takao on the edge of Tokyo, with more than 2.5 million visitors a year, and Snowdon (Yr Wyddfa) in Wales, where 543,541 walkers climbed to the top in 2022, the highest published count of people going up on foot. Next come Mount Fuji, at roughly 300,000 climbers in 2009, and Ben Nevis and Mount Monadnock, at 150,000 and 125,000 a year respectively. No single body counts climbers worldwide, so each figure comes from a different park authority or survey, quoted here as Wikipedia gives it with its year, and some include people who ride a cable car or railway part of the way. Read continent by continent, the pattern is clear: the busiest mountains are modest peaks within a day trip of large cities, or sacred summits with paved stairways, not the giants of the Himalaya.
Ten Busy Peaks Compared, With What Each Figure Counts
| Rank | Mountain (country) | Annual figure | What is counted |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mount Tai (China) | about 6,000,000 (2003) | visitors, with bus and cable car available |
| 2 | Mount Takao (Japan) | over 2,500,000 | visitors, some by funicular |
| 3 | Table Mountain (South Africa) | about 1,000,000 | cableway passengers |
| 4 | Snowdon (Wales, UK) | 543,541 (2022) | walkers on foot |
| 5 | Mount Fuji (Japan) | about 300,000 (2009) | climbers |
| 6 | Ben Nevis (Scotland, UK) | about 150,000 | visitors to the peak |
| 7 | Mount Monadnock (United States) | about 125,000 | hikers |
| 8 | Kilimanjaro (Tanzania) | about 50,000 | trekkers aiming for the summit |
| 9 | Mont Blanc (France–Italy) | about 20,000 | summit attempts (2017) |
| 10 | Mount Everest (Nepal–China) | 891 (spring 2019 record) | summits in one season |
The gap between the top of the table and the bottom is a gap in difficulty. Mount Tai and Mount Takao have stone steps, temples and transport halfway up. Snowdon, Ben Nevis and Monadnock are long but non-technical walks. Kilimanjaro and Mont Blanc demand days of acclimatisation or glacier skills, and Everest’s record season of 891 summits is fewer than Snowdon’s average of about 1,500 walkers a day.
East Asia: Mount Tai, Mount Takao and Fuji’s Daily Cap
Mount Tai (Tai Shan) rises north of the city of Tai’an in Shandong province. Its Jade Emperor Peak reaches 1,532.7 m (often quoted as 1,545 m), and it has been a place of worship for at least 3,000 years as the eastern mountain of China’s Five Sacred Mountains. Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor, held a ceremony on the summit in 219 BC, and later emperors returned for the Feng and Shan sacrifices to Heaven and Earth. More than 1,800 stone inscriptions line the routes. UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1987, and it attracted around six million visitors in 2003. A bus runs to the Midway Gate to Heaven and a cable car continues from there to the summit, while the same stretch on foot takes two and a half to six hours, so the figure counts visitors to the mountain rather than people who climbed every step.
Mount Takao is only 599 m (1,965 ft) high, but it lies within an hour of central Tokyo and has eight hiking trails. More than 2.5 million people visit each year. The walk to the top takes about 90 minutes, though a funicular and a ropeway carry visitors halfway, and the Buddhist temple of Yakuōin draws pilgrims to pray to the tengu. Trail 1 is lit with lanterns for night hikes.
Mount Fuji, at 3,776 m, is Japan’s highest peak and is climbed in a short summer season. About 300,000 people climbed it in 2009. Most start at the fifth stations, reachable by bus, and spend five to seven hours on the ascent; the Yoshida route on the Yamanashi side is the busiest because of its parking and its many huts. Crowding led Yamanashi prefecture to introduce a 2,000-yen fee on the Yoshida trail from the 2024 season, a daily limit of 4,000 hikers, and a closure between 4 p.m. and 3 a.m. for anyone not staying in a hut. Shizuoka prefecture then announced matching closures on its three trails. The site’s profile of Mount Fuji covers its volcanic history in more detail.
Kinabalu and Everest: Asia’s Rationed Summits
Elsewhere in Asia the numbers are deliberately small. On Mount Kinabalu in Sabah, Malaysia (4,095 m), only 130 people a day are allowed to climb, set by the beds in the summit huts. Everest’s totals are tiny by comparison: as of December 2024 the Himalayan Database recorded just under 13,000 summits by around 7,200 people since 1953, although 169 climbers reached the top on a single day, 23 May 2010.
Britain and the Alps: Snowdon, Ben Nevis and Mont Blanc
Snowdon, or Yr Wyddfa, is 1,085 m (3,560 ft) high and the highest mountain in Wales. It has been called the busiest mountain in Britain, and 543,541 people walked up it in 2022. There are six main paths; the most popular starts in the village of Llanberis. The Snowdon Mountain Railway, opened in 1896, runs 7.6 km from Llanberis to the summit station and carried 98,567 passengers in 2021, on top of the walkers. At busy times people queue for upwards of 45 minutes to stand on the summit pillar.
Ben Nevis, at 1,345 m (4,413 ft) the highest mountain in the British Isles, attracts an estimated 150,000 visitors a year, about three-quarters of whom use the Mountain Track from Glen Nevis. Its summit plateau still carries the ruins of an observatory that was staffed continuously from 1883 to 1904, and its 700 m north-face cliffs are Scotland’s main ice-climbing ground. Snowdon and Ben Nevis, with Scafell Pike in England, make up the National Three Peaks Challenge.
Mont Blanc, at 4,807 m on the French–Italian border, is a mountaineering objective rather than a walk. An average of about 20,000 people climb it each year. In 2017 fourteen people died out of 20,000 summit attempts, and in some summers rockfall and crevasses close the classic routes for days at a time.
North America: Mount Monadnock’s 125,000 Hikers
Mount Monadnock in the town of Jaffrey, New Hampshire, is the reason so many lists put a small American peak beside Fuji. It is just 965 m (3,165 ft) high, but it stands nearly 300 m above any other summit within 48 km, and it lies about 100 km northwest of Boston. Its bare, rocky top gives wide views, and about 125,000 hikers climb it each year. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the poem “Monadnoc” about it, and Henry David Thoreau visited four times between 1844 and 1860, compiling one of the first naturalist inventories of the mountain. American geologists now use the word monadnock for any isolated mountain of hard rock left standing after the softer rock around it has eroded away, what is called an inselberg elsewhere.
Farther north, Mount Washington (1,917 m, 6,288 ft) draws visitors by three routes at once: hiking trails including the Appalachian Trail, the Mount Washington Auto Road, first built as a coach road in 1861, and the Cog Railway of 1869. Its summit records hurricane-force gusts on average 110 days a year.
Africa: Kilimanjaro’s Trekkers and Table Mountain’s Cableway
Kilimanjaro, at 5,895 m (19,341 ft), is the highest mountain in Africa and the highest free-standing mountain in the world. Roughly 50,000 trekkers a year set out for Uhuru Peak on seven established routes, with an average summit success rate of 70–80%. No ropes are needed, but the altitude is the real danger. The climbing trade provided irregular and seasonal work for about 11,000 guides, porters and cooks in 2007. Hans Meyer made the first recorded ascent in 1889, and the mountain became Kilimanjaro National Park in 1973. The site’s guide to Mount Kilimanjaro describes the routes and climate zones.
Table Mountain above Cape Town is climbed on foot by many, but the bigger number is mechanical: about one million people a year use the Table Mountain Aerial Cableway, which opened on 4 October 1929 and welcomed its 28 millionth visitor in January 2019. Table Mountain National Park as a whole attracts 4.2 million visits a year, making it the most visited national park in South Africa.
South America and Australia: Aconcagua and Kosciuszko
The southern continents have no mountains with crowds on the scale of Tai or Snowdon, but each has a well-trodden high point. Aconcagua in Argentina’s Mendoza province, at nearly 7,000 m the highest mountain outside Asia, is often described as the highest non-technical mountain in the world: the normal route from the north needs no ropes. Even so, the air at the summit has about 40% of sea-level pressure, summit success is estimated at 30–40%, and the mountain records about three deaths a year. Around 75% of climbers come from abroad, led by the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Mount Kosciuszko, mainland Australia’s highest point at 2,228 m (7,310 ft), is the easiest of the Seven Summits. Until 1977 visitors could drive almost to the top from Charlotte Pass; today the road is open only to walkers and cyclists as far as Rawson Pass, from where a 1.4 km path leads to the summit. Walkers can also start at the top of the Thredbo chairlift, which runs all year, for a round trip of three to three and a half hours.
The same rule holds across all six regions: a mountain gets crowded when it is close to a city, sacred, or easy, and the hardest peaks stay quiet. For the other end of the scale, see the site’s list of the most dangerous mountains to climb, where annual climber numbers are counted in hundreds rather than hundreds of thousands.