Klimmek has one job, and he takes it seriously. The supplies-runner waiting in the village of Ivarstead exists to warn every Dragonborn that the climb to High Hrothgar is brutal — that to reach the Greybeards at the top of the Throat of the World, you must work your way up the 7,000 Steps. Fifteen years on, a Bethesda developer has confirmed something fans long suspected: the studio genuinely tried to honour that number.
The reveal comes from Bethesda’s 40th anniversary celebrations — the same retrospective push that finally confirmed The Elder Scrolls 6’s subtitle — which invited staff to reminisce about their past work. Associate art director Dan Lee’s contribution was an admission of magnificent futility, delivered with the weary honesty of a man who once counted stairs for a living.
The Count That Never Added Up
It is well documented that Skyrim doesn’t actually contain 7,000 steps. Some are buried under snow, making an exact count impossible, but players who have tallied the carved stone estimate the real figure sits closer to 700. Even the most generous interpretation — counting footsteps rather than carved steps — comes up short: researchers at the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages measured approximately 2,400 footsteps for the full climb.
The discrepancy has been a running joke in the community for over a decade, the kind of detail Skyrim’s modding-and-mythology culture thrives on. What nobody knew until now is that the gap between lore and geometry bothered at least one person inside Bethesda too.
Dan Lee’s Best Attempt Wrapped Around the Mountain
Lee wasn’t responsible for Skyrim’s terrain layout, but he was the one refining the shapes of High Hrothgar, studying the mountain from every viewpoint to keep its silhouette interesting. His work included sculpting, cluttering and dressing the peak with visual effects, plants and objects — and yes, the infamous steps themselves.
“I did my darndest to find a way to fit all 7,000 steps into the storied path. However, my best attempt included extending far past Ivarstead, wrapping around the mountain and ending near Whiterun in the frozen tundra. It turns out, 7,000 is quite a lot!” — Dan Lee, Bethesda
Read that again: a faithful version of the pilgrimage would have turned the climb into a trek spanning half the map, from the village at the mountain’s foot all the way to the tundra outside Whiterun. A lore-accurate staircase, in other words, would have consumed the game. The lore, it turns out, was always aspirational.
No Responsibility for the Frost Troll
Lee was also keen to settle one score. His work on the mountain did not include enemy encounters — so the Frost Troll lurking mid-climb, the woe of countless under-levelled players making their first trek to the Greybeards, was someone else’s doing. “I take no responsibility for the Frost Troll,” he wrote, presumably to the relief of nobody who has ever been ragdolled off the path at level six.
That troll has become one of Skyrim’s shared trauma points, up there with the mudcrabs of the opening beach and the first dragon at the Western Watchtower. Now we know it was placed there by a different hand entirely — the art of the mountain and the menace on it were, quite literally, separate departments.
Why Skyrim Compresses the World
The anecdote is a neat illustration of how open-world games cheat — deliberately. Skyrim isn’t designed to scale: if it were, the capital city of Solitude would have a population of under 100 people. Distances are compressed so journeys don’t take a week, and for every named NPC on screen, players are meant to imagine crowds off-camera.
The same logic applies to the steps. For every carved stair the Dragonborn actually climbs, there are nine implied ones we never see — and, one suspects, considerably more Frost Trolls. The mountain is a metaphor for the pilgrimage, not a surveyor’s report.
Bethesda’s anniversary retrospective has been full of these small confessions, and there’s a question hanging over all of them: with The Elder Scrolls 6 finally moving, will its landmarks honour their lore one-to-one — or will some kind soul on the team try, fail, and confess about it in another fifteen years?
