It would have been a much easier climb if Sir Edmund Hillary had just driven up Everest.

But nobody’s ever been plum crazy enough to try to build a road to the summit.

Not like in New Hampshire, where in 1853 - exactly a century before Hillary and his Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay reached the roof of the world - work began on a carriage road to the top of Mt. Washington, the tallest peak in the northeastern United States.

Granted, at 8,850 metres, Everest is 41ž2 times higher than the 1,917-metre Mt. Washington in the Presidential Range of the White Mountains. But it must have seemed as monumental a task for the labourers hired to build the road.

And while the New Hampshire mountain pales in size to Nepal’s “goddess mother of the world,” it’s right up there in killing capacity.

To date, Mt. Washington has claimed 139 lives, more than such giants as K2, Denali, Lhotse and Aconcagua. Everest’s toll is around 200, making Mt. Washington the second deadliest mountain in the world.

Photo special to the hamilton spectator The Mt. Washington Auto Road cuts a path through three vegetation zones.

Lives have been lost to hypothermia, drowning, falling ice, avalanches, falls, natural and unknown causes, but only two fatalities have involved the road - an astonishingly low number given the 40,000 private vehicles that make the trek every year.

The most recent was a 22-year-old woman from Massachusetts, who died in 1984 when her car experienced brake failure. A little more than 100 years earlier, Mrs. Ira Chichester from Michigan died when a drunken stage driver, who’d imbibed many few too many at a halfway house on the mountain, drove his horse-drawn coach off the road.

The Auto Road’s track record since its opening in 1861 makes it the safest toll road in the U.S. It’s also the oldest man-made tourist attraction in the country.

The first trail to the top of the mountain, which natives considered the Home of the Great Spirit, was cleared in 1819 by local settlers. By mid-century, train service had been extended into the White Mountains and tourists were coming in droves. The railroad bankrolled the construction of the Glen Bridle Path, which was the subject of one of American artist Winslow Homer’s most well known works. His 1868 oil painting, Bridle Path, White Mountains, depicts a smartly dressed young woman riding sidesaddle on a white horse along a trail above the tree line.

The summit was becoming the place to be.

Without any kind of modern machinery - all the building materials had to be hauled nine miles up by horse, oxen or men - and in wildly changing weather, an inn was built at the top in 1852. It was anchored by heavy chains that stretched across the rooftop and down the other side, just like the little gift shop that’s there now (and probably would have blown away long ago if it weren’t for the chains.)

“You have to understand,” says guide Steve DeBenedictis, “you earned big bragging rights staying at the top of Mt. Washington.”

The next year, the state legislature chartered the Mt. Washington Carriage Road Company to plan and build the road, which was to be “sixteen feet wide, macadamized, and have a protection wall, three feet high in dangerous places.”

The undertaking began with a budget of $50,000 and a work crew of 80 men, but costs proved to be extraordinary and in 1856, the company went bankrupt.

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