Turns out, the towering volcano where the One Ring was forged…isn’t all that towering, after all. Frodo and Sam’s final hike, while certainly no walk in the park, wasn’t exactly a daring feat of mountaineering prowess, either.

Tolkien was very specific about Mount Doom’s height in The Return of the King:

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 [1].

So 3,000 feet for the shoulders, and another 1,500 feet for the cinder cone, equaling 4,500 feet from base to summit. That’s about the same size as Mount Vesuvius, the infamous stratovolcano in Italy that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD.

As far as volcanoes go, 4,500 feet is actually quite small. Mount Kilimanjaro, for instance, is over 19,000 feet, and Italy’s other famous volcano, Mount Etna, is nearly 11,000. 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.

But elevation isn’t the only reason Frodo and Sam had it easy. Mount Doom’s diameter was 7 miles at the base, meaning the average slope was only 20 degrees [2]. That’s even shallower than Mount Fuji‘s gentle Kawaguchiko trail (21.6 degrees). Most hikers consider anything less that 30 degrees “easy.” You wouldn’t need switchbacks at that angle, making a shorter, direct approach possible.

Not to mention, Frodo and Sam didn’t have to hike all the way to the top. The entrance to Sauron’s Sammath Naur (“Chambers of Fire”) is “high in the upper cone but still far from the reeking summit” [3], which probably puts it near the 4,000-foot mark. And given the diameter and the average slope, they would’ve covered 3.5 miles or so to get there.

So. 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. If you’re in good shape and a decent hiker, you could do it even faster.

Of course, Frodo and Sam also had to deal with free-flying chucks of lava and choking clouds of ash. We can glean from Tolkien’s description that Mount Doom, like Vesuvius and Etna, was an active “composite” or “strato-” volcano: a conical mass of layered material from past and present eruptions. A treacherous amalgam of hardened ash, lava, and pumice. Whenever Sauron was at work or gaining strength, Mount Doom was erupting, so the slopes Frodo and Sam climbed would have been constantly changing in size and shape.

Luckily, Frodo and Sam approached Mount Doom from the north. Gaping, steaming fissures had opened up on the southern, western, and eastern slopes of the volcano, and recent lava flows had destroyed the southern slopes of the mountain [4]. But the hobbits reached Mount Doom from the north after escaping from orcs near the Isenmouthe, until they met up with Sauron’s Road (a well-maintained trail that connected Mount Doom to Barad-dûr in the east), which wound its way around the cinder cone, straight to the entrance to the Chambers of Fire.

Thanks to the Great Eagles, the hobbits didn’t even have to make the trek back down the mountain.

I’ve never been so lucky on my own hikes.

1. Tolkien, J. R. R.The Lord of the Rings. 941. 50th Anniversary ed.
2. Fonstad, Karen Wynn. The Atlas of Middle-Earth. 146. Rev. ed.
3. Ibid. 1, 942.
4. Ibid. 2