re: Map of the lower 48 by elevation

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People confuse mountain height with vertical rise

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Isn't vertical rise termed "prominence?"

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Isn't vertical rise termed "prominence?"

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It's close but they're not exactly the same

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People confuse mountain height with vertical rise.

Mountain height is from sea level. Those mountains in the rockies aren't rising 13,000 feet from the land around it. They're rising 6-7,000 feet because the land elevation is already 6,000 feet or so.

The higher Appalachian mountains have a pretty substantial rise. They're just starting from a much lower position.

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Just to further this point this is a picture of Mt Washington in New Hampshire whose elevation is 6288 feet. Much shorter in elevation than anywhere in the Rockies but that picture looks like somewhere in Colorado because the rise isn't much shorter.

This is a much more beautiful map. We have the most beautiful maps, don't we folks?

quote:

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People confuse mountain height with vertical rise.

Mountain height is from sea level. Those mountains in the rockies aren't rising 13,000 feet from the land around it. They're rising 6-7,000 feet because the land elevation is already 6,000 feet or so.

The higher Appalachian mountains have a pretty substantial rise. They're just starting from a much lower position.

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My good friend, who I visit multiple times a year, lives north of Colorado Springs. I can see Pikes Peak off his balcony. While it looks beautiful it doesn't look very high. That's because his house sits at 7200'.

Arkansas has some decent sized mountains.

You can almost see LA and FL naturally carved out.

Cool map

UP appears to be Canadian now eh

Ride due west as the sun sets, turn left at the Rocky Mountains.

The issue wasn’t steepness. The issue was that the Appalachians are more or less continuous. There are very few natural breaks in the mountains, so it’s difficult to get around them. The rockies are broken up into many ranges with lots of passes between them. Finding the Cumberland Gap was so important because it really was one of the few natural passes through the mountains to get from the east coast to the Ohio River Valley.