How many steps are there actually on the path to High Hrothgar
The title says it all.
It is mentioned several times that there are 7000 steps on the path to High Hrothgar. Are there actually 7000 steps or are the NPCs exaggerating?
For the good of Gaming.SE, I actually counted the steps. There are nowhere near 7,000 steps in the game: I counted 732 visible step-like objects (tiered, flat platforms) on the way to High Hrothgar.
- Bridge to Emblem I: 21
- Emblem I to II: 151
- Emblem II to III: 173
- Emblem III to IV: 124
- Emblem IV to V: 59
- Emblem V to VI: 54
- Emblem VI to VII: 24
- Emblem VII to VIII: 19
- Emblem VIII to IX: 51
- Emblem IX to X: 25
- Emblem X to Door: 31
Now, the path to High Hrothgar is really worn down: there are several huge gaps between the flights of stairs that may have conceivably had steps at some distant point in the past.
If so, there are 6,268 steps missing, or about 569 steps per segment. I don't doubt the world artists are amazing, but they definitely took some liberties in how the "steps" were designed.
As an aside, while coming up with an optimal, real-time route between Ivarstead and High Hrothgar was too tedious, I did note that fast travelling between both locations took 3 hours, 16 minutes in-game. At this speed, it'd be about 2,142 "steps" per hour, or one step every two seconds.
Given each step appears to be around a meter deep, the travel time is about 2.1 km/h. Googling around, I found that Trail Trove estimated most hikers move at around 3.2-4.8 km/h, which would make the trek up to High Hrothgar a particularly difficult hike. Although all things considered, not much of an inconvenience than an afternoon hike in a state park.
Based on an average human walk speed of 3 miles per hour and 2,000 steps per mile, the path to High Hrothgar would have to be 3.5 miles long if the claim of "7,000 steps" is true. Walking this distance would take just over an hour, or roughly one hour forty minutes uphill accounting for the height.
To test your question, I walked from the doors of High Hrothgar to the bridge at Ivarstead in 23 minutes real-time, or 7 hours 40 minutes of game-time. According to real-time, the path to High Hrothgar is only about 2,000 steps. Going by game-time, it would be more like 45,000 steps.
An alternative meaning could be that there are literally 7,000 stairs along the path. This can't be true either. Each stair is large enough to take two footsteps to walk over. In order for this explanation to be true, the entire path would have to be paved with steps seven abreast, whereas they are only around two to four abreast, and at least half of the path is unpaved.
The entire game is scaled. Take Fallout 3 or New Vegas as great examples, since those are based on real-world locations. Note that the entirety of Fallout 3 could likely fit inside the real-world location between the Jefferson Memorial and Capitol building (roughly 2 miles, based on MapQuest scaling), but they are just a few hundred yards away in the game, and the real-world distance between the Capitol building and Bethesda is like 8 miles, even though the entire game world is only 2 to 3 miles across (and represents like 50 miles of real-world terrain). Similarly, Primm is something like an hour's drive from Las Vegas in real life, and going from the center of Vegas to the Hoover dam takes 20 to 30 minutes (at 2 in the morning with no traffic), but either is a 5 minute run in NV.
Likewise, Skyrim (like Cyrodiil and Vvardenfell before it) is supposed to be a huge chunk of an entire continent perhaps the size of North America, yet is only a couple miles across relative to your character (and would easily fit into most major real-life cities). Perhaps the "real" Skyrim had 7000 literal steps before the snow covered half of them, but the in-game, scaled-down Skyrim likely does not.
Check out this map of Tamriel, and realize that's an entire continent. We can't be positive on the details, given how the physics of the world are vastly different than those on Earth, but it seems likely that Nirn was intended to be somewhere on the same scale as Earth, making "real" Tamriel quite vast -- far larger than the games portray, for obvious technically-limited reasons.