Philips ConnorThere is something both admirable and unsettling about roads carved entirely by human hands. These are not the smooth highways we take for granted.
They are raw expressions of desperation, ambition, or sometimes just stubbornness. Built with pickaxes, dynamite, and sheer bloody-mindedness, they exist in places where common sense suggested leaving well enough alone.
What makes them particularly dangerous is not just their location. The manual construction itself created vulnerabilities that modern machinery might have avoided. Uneven surfaces from hand-drilling.
Blind corners cut at whatever angle seemed feasible at the time. Support structures that depended more on hope than engineering principles.
1. North Yungas Road, Bolivia
The locals just call it Death Road, which tells you most of what you need to know. Running forty-three miles from La Paz down to Coroico, it drops from over fifteen thousand feet to the humid lowlands through the Yungas rainforest. Paraguayan prisoners of war built it during the 1930s Chaco War, hacking into vertical rock faces with tools that seem primitive even for that era.
The road rarely exceeds ten feet in width. In several sections, it narrows further. There are places where the cliff face rises on one side and simply vanishes on the other, plunging two thousand feet straight down. The Bolivian government estimated somewhere between two hundred and three hundred deaths annually before they finally built a bypass in 2006. Those are official numbers, which probably means the real count was higher.
Fog rolls in without warning. Landslides follow the same schedule, which is to say no schedule at all. The road surface stays slick with mud even in dry weather because humidity from the forest below never really leaves. Mountain biking tour companies now run trips down it, which strikes me as the kind of idea that sounds better in a hostel after several beers than it does when you are actually looking over the edge.
If you drive it, do it in daylight. At altitude, your reaction time lags behind what your brain thinks it should be. This is not the place to discover that gap.
2. Skippers Canyon Road, New Zealand
Gold fever does strange things to people’s sense of self-preservation. Between 1883 and 1909, miners carved this sixteen-and-a-half-mile track into the cliffs above the Shotover River in Otago. They used black powder, hand drills, and apparently a complete disregard for their own mortality.
The road climbs six hundred feet above the river at points. It has more than fifty sharp bends. There are zero guardrails. The rock is schist, which turns to something like wet soap when it rains. Rental car companies specifically void your insurance if you drive here, which is their polite way of saying “we know how this ends.”
During construction, several miners fell. After construction, more people fell. The pattern continues. What keeps drawing people back is the view, which is genuinely spectacular. The Shotover runs turquoise below, carving through rock that looks almost orange in certain light. It is beautiful in the way that a lot of dangerous things are beautiful.
You need four-wheel drive. You need to go slowly enough that it feels ridiculous. If you meet another vehicle, one of you will be reversing for possibly miles to find a passing spot, and you will negotiate this while hanging halfway over a cliff. The process clarifies priorities quickly.
3. Guoliang Tunnel Road, China
Sometimes government indifference breeds its own solution. In the early 1970s, villagers in Guoliang were trapped in their settlement in the Taihang Mountains of Henan Province. The only access was a treacherous footpath they called the Sky Ladder. They asked for a road. The government declined.
So they built one themselves. Thirteen villagers led the work, using hammers and chisels to carve three-quarters of a mile through solid rock. It took five years. Five of them died during construction from falls and tunnel collapses. Their families kept working.
The tunnel they created runs thirteen feet wide and sixteen feet high. Windows were cut into the mountain side, though calling them windows makes them sound more deliberate than they were. They are rough openings that frame thousand-foot drops to the valley below. The tunnel accommodates one vehicle at a time. The curves are blind. People still misjudge the width and scrape their vehicles along the walls, or worse, misjudge which side has the wall.
China does not publicize accident statistics for rural roads, but locals will tell you stories. What the tunnel does provide, despite its dangers, is connection. Before it existed, Guoliang might as well have been on another planet. Now it is merely hard to reach, which counts as progress.
In tunnels like this, sound behaves strangely. Engine noise echoes in ways that make it hard to judge distances. Honk before entering. Honk around corners. Assume someone is coming the other way because eventually someone will be.
4. Fairy Meadows Road, Pakistan
The name is aggressively misleading. This six-mile track branches off the Karakoram Highway in Gilgit-Baltistan and climbs toward Nanga Parbat, which has earned the nickname Killer Mountain through considerable effort. Local shepherds and porters scratched out the road decades ago with whatever tools they had available, which was not much.
The road is barely wide enough for a jeep. That assumes the jeep is not carrying extra passengers clinging to the roof and sides, which most jeeps there are. Avalanches come down without warning. Rocks fall constantly, ranging from pebbles to boulders that could flatten a vehicle. The edge drops twenty-six hundred feet in places, entirely unprotected by barriers or even a suggestion of gravel to mark where solid ground ends.
Monsoon season turns it into a different beast entirely. Mud flows like water. Traction disappears. Drivers talk about mud reducing your control by seventy percent, which seems both specific and optimistic. What the road offers, for those who make it, is access to some of the most striking alpine scenery on Earth. Meadows spread out below Nanga Parbat’s massive south face, genuinely deserving the fairy tale description.
Rescue options barely exist. Helicopters struggle at that altitude and cannot fly in bad weather, which is most weather. If you go, use tire chains even when it looks dry. Do not travel at dusk. Shadows hide problems that need to be seen well in advance.
5. Halsema Highway, Philippines
Ninety-three miles through the Cordillera mountains of Luzon, connecting Baguio to Tuguegarao. Indigenous Ifugao laborers built it in the 1930s with machetes and dynamite, working through monsoons that buried some of them in mudslides before the road was finished. The pattern established during construction persists.
The highway reaches seventy-four hundred feet at its highest point. Fog sits there like a resident, not a visitor. Edges crumble continuously. Buses overloaded with passengers and cargo tip into ravines often enough that it barely makes news unless the death toll exceeds twenty or so. Annual crashes run over one hundred. Many are fatal. Poor signage contributes, but so does poor judgment, which signage cannot fix.
Earthquakes add another variable. The Philippines sits on active fault lines, and the Cordillera region gets shaken regularly. Cracks appear in the road surface. Sometimes sections simply collapse. What keeps the highway essential is that it provides the only real access to the rice terraces and tribal communities in the region. Economic necessity outweighs safety concerns, which is a calculation people make more often than they admit.
If you feel tremors while driving, pull over at the widest spot you can find immediately. Falling debris kills faster than most people can react. Wait until the shaking stops and then wait longer to see if anything above you looks unstable.
6. Zoji La Pass, India
Fifty-two miles of Himalayan hostility connecting Srinagar to Leh at eleven thousand five hundred seventy-five feet. Indian Army engineers blasted it through in the 1940s during wartime, using hand tools because machinery was needed elsewhere. Avalanches killed workers during construction. Avalanches still kill people now.
Ice covers the hairpin turns most of the year. Wind hits hard enough to move vehicles. There are no guardrails because installing them would require a level of faith in the road surface that nobody has. The pass supplies Ladakh, which means military convoys dominate traffic. Civilian jeeps navigate between them and occasionally lose that negotiation by sliding into gorges that swallow vehicles completely.
Officially, the pass closes in winter. Unofficially, people try to cross anyway out of desperation or misjudgment. Border patrol logs show dozens of deaths yearly, though that only counts the bodies they find.
Altitude affects thinking before you notice it happening. At that elevation, decision-making lags. Headaches signal altitude sickness, which can escalate to cerebral edema faster than the drive down to safety takes. Hydration helps more than it seems like it should. Drink more water than feels necessary. Watch for symptoms in yourself and others.
7. Stelvio Pass, Italy
Europe’s highest paved pass at just over nine thousand feet, running fifteen miles from Prato to Bormio through forty-eight hairpin turns. Austro-Hungarian prisoners built it during World War One with picks and forced labor. The engineering reflects wartime priorities, which did not include safety margins.
Drops are sheer in many sections. Width is minimal. Summer brings tourists and cyclists who meet each other in blind corners with predictable results. Fog and snow create slides. Since 2000, documented fatalities exceed twenty from vehicles going over the edge, though that number only includes confirmed deaths where bodies were recovered.
The Giro d’Italia bicycle race made Stelvio famous, which brings more people who underestimate it. Descents are particularly dangerous because brakes overheat. Smell burning brakes and you are already in trouble. The gradient does not let up enough to let things cool down naturally.
Use engine braking on the way down. Downshift early and often. Let the transmission do the work instead of relying on brake pads that will fade. Signal turns well in advance because cyclists cannot stop as quickly as you can, assuming you can stop at all.
8. Dalton Highway, Alaska
Four hundred fourteen miles from Fairbanks to the Prudhoe Bay oil fields through country that actively resists human presence. Pipeline workers built it in 1974 with bulldozers and extensive hand-clearing work, pushing through permafrost that shifts and cracks under temperature changes.
Winter buries sections under twenty feet of snow. Summer brings dust storms thick enough to cut visibility to nothing while you are driving beside thousand-foot ravines. The highway exists in isolation that turns mechanical failure into genuine emergency. Thirty wrecks annually is the rough average, including truck rollovers that block the road for days. Over one hundred construction workers died building it, mostly from exposure.
The television show Ice Road Truckers filmed here, which gave it notoriety. What the show could not fully convey is how alone you are. Breakdowns can mean waiting hours for help to arrive, assuming help knows you need it. Black ice forms without warning. Four-wheel drive provides only marginal advantage over physics.
Carry a satellite phone. The cellular network does not reach most of the route. Drive in convoys when possible. Local truckers know where problems develop and can spot hazards that newcomers miss until it is too late.
9. Sichuan-Tibet Highway, China
Fifteen hundred miles from Chengdu to Lhasa across fourteen mountain ranges, hand-forged by Tibetan laborers in the 1950s during political upheaval that did not pause for safety. Earthquakes and floods killed workers during construction. Earthquakes and floods still kill drivers now. Landslides bury convoys regularly enough that official counts exceed one hundred deaths yearly from rockfalls alone, and official counts are rarely complete.
The highway crosses sixteen thousand feet in places where thin air makes thinking difficult and mistakes easy. Yaks wander into traffic because they belong there more than vehicles do. Nomadic herders depend on this road despite its dangers, or perhaps because no alternative exists. Prayer flags mark dangerous sections, though that might just be confirmation bias since dangerous sections outnumber safe ones.
The highway runs along active fault lines. Seismic activity provides warning sometimes. Smartphone apps track earthquake alerts in real-time, which sounds modern until you realize you are using technology to predict whether a mountain is about to fall on you. The apps work, though. They save lives. Use them.
10. Kolyma Highway, Russia
Thirteen hundred miles across Siberia’s Far East, built by Gulag prisoners between 1932 and 1953 under Stalin’s orders. A quarter million prisoners died during construction. Their bodies went into the roadbed as fill material, which is where the nickname Road of Bones originated. This is not metaphor. The bones are there, under the gravel, thawing and refreezing with the seasons.
Winter temperatures drop to minus sixty-two Fahrenheit. Ice forms over rivers that the road crosses. Sometimes the ice holds. Sometimes it does not. Summer thaws create mud that swallows vehicles whole. Remote crashes go unnoticed for days because traffic is sparse and communication is worse. The highway serves gold mines, echoing the forced labor that built it with the voluntary desperation of people chasing money in places no sane person would choose to live.
Frostbite develops faster than most people expect. Layered wool helps. Thermal scanners detect thin ice over rivers, which is the difference between crossing safely and breaking through into water cold enough to stop your heart in minutes.
Conclusion
These roads exist at the intersection of necessity and hubris. They connect communities that would otherwise be isolated. They generate revenue through tourism and resource extraction. They also kill people regularly, which is the cost nobody wants to calculate directly.
Modern engineering offers improvements. Drones survey unstable sections. Better barriers could be installed, in theory. But theory meets reality in the form of budgets, remoteness, and the simple fact that some places resist being made safe. The roads were built by hand because machinery could not reach them. Maintaining them properly faces the same limitations.
If you travel these routes, prepare seriously. Study maps. Check weather. Carry emergency supplies that assume rescue will not come quickly. Most importantly, understand that the risk is real. People have died on every road listed here. More will.
Respect the engineering that created them. Respect the people who died building them. Respect the fact that nature tolerates these roads but does not welcome them.