A gondola does its thing near Colorado's Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park in 2024. Photo / Matt McClain, The Washington Post
From California to Colorado, one universal experience defines growing up in the American West.
It’s not the wide-open skies. Or the deer and the antelope. It’s not even the lack of humidity, blissful as it may be.
It’s taking your first trip back East, visiting a national park and turning to your friends to say, “They call this a mountain?”
Well, it occurred to us that we may be able to measure that!
We found a dataset that allows us to measure what separates a hill from a mountain, and maybe even see if it changes as you go west.
We’ve previously used the Geographic Names Information System from the United States Geological Survey to map all the American places named for foreign countries, alcoholic beverages and animals.
But you know what we hadn’t yet exploited? Its elevation data.
The database includes the names and elevations of more than two million US places, including 70,669 “summits” – the dataset’s name for everything from a mound to a mountain to a mesa.
Mesas thrive in the desert southwest, of course, while peaks rise in the mountain west and knobs lurk in the Mid-Atlantic.
Most tall things get named either hill (as in Bunker or of Beans) or mountain (as in Stone), but data reveals dozens of more creative options, including more than 200 variations on domes (as in Teapot), 48 humps, 45 roundtops, 41 nipples and – our personal favourite – 22 nubbles.
A nipple is taller than a nubble, on average, and both of them dwarf bluffs, mounds, and knobs.
There are no official definitions – our friends at the Geological Survey seem to have abandoned their efforts to enforce landform-classification discipline sometime in the 1970s.
So, in case you find yourself needing to name a tectonic protuberance anytime soon, we’ve tossed around the numbers and teased out some basic rules of thumb.
If it looms less than 800ft (245m) above the lower points of interest nearby, it’s probably a hill.
Anything taller than that gets to be a mountain.
That is, until you get to 5000ft (1525m), when high places get to be peaks (as in Pikes).
Peaks predominate until you hit truly rarefied air.
At 7000 or 8000ft (2135-2440m), the more majestic mount prefix (as in Rainier) rises to reign supreme.
But, as we suspected, those national averages mask mammoth regional discrepancies.
At about 2600ft (800m) above its surroundings, the typical mountain in the West is more than four times as tall as what passes for a mountain in the Midwest.
And the South and the Northeast have only marginally higher standards.
The gaps for what gets the coveted Mount prefix are even wider. But our favourite fact of them all may be that what a Westerner calls a “hill” is taller than what passes for a mountain in the Midwest or the South.
In fact, the South’s mountain inflation may be the most egregious in the entire country.
Down here, mountain becomes more popular than hill between 200 and 300ft (60-90m). Even the Midwest has higher standards than that, putting the cutoff at about 600ft (180m). In the West and the Northeast, it’s about 1000ft (305m).
We worried we’d made a hightop out of a haystack – both actual summit types! – by drawing attention to these discrepancies. But then we talked to Davnah Urbach.
Urbach works for the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment at the Universities of Bern and Lausanne. And in her line of work, defining mountains is serious business. It’s also surprisingly difficult.
In the early days, scientists relied on ad hoc definitions born from their own regional and cultural biases. As a result, they occasionally talked past one another. A fact that may be incontrovertible under one person’s idea of a “mountain” may be useless under another’s.
Even today, when we’ve mostly settled on three major definitions of mountains, the choice is critical.
Depending on which you go with, you could estimate mountains cover anywhere between 12.5% and 30% of the six most habitable continents.
One of the definitions, the one from Urbach’s group, doesn’t even mention elevation, the variable we’ve been focusing on for this entire column.
Elevation isn’t a particularly reliable indicator, Urbach told us, because you can find awfully flat plains at high elevations and towering mountains at sea level.
Temperature and climate don’t work well either – Earth abounds with cold corners that aren’t mountainous.
Instead, the group defines mountains entirely by the ruggedness of the terrain.
Steep slopes bring rapid changes in climate across very short distances and thus determine which species can live there, she told us.
Urbach is careful to say that definition isn’t any better than the ad hoc classifications US settlers – or their Indigenous predecessors – assembled when naming landforms.
But it is consistent, which is certainly more than you get from the folks who gave the same name to 260ft (79m) Mt Hood in Massachusetts and 11,000ft (3350m) Mt Hood in Oregon.
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