Mountains: why the highest one isn't in the Rockies

Kluane Lake, Yukon, the pull-out on the Alaska Highway, July. Dawn Ferguson is forty-six, a glacier guide who came from Scotland twenty years ago and stayed in Haines Junction. Every summer a visitor asks her where the Rocky Mountain is. She points at the wall of white peaks across the lake and says: those aren't the Rockies. They're taller.

So here's the question. If the highest mountain in Canada isn't in the Rockies, where is it, what are the other ranges, and how do you tell how high anything is from a flat piece of paper?

Parks Canada gives the answer. Mount Logan, 5,959 m, is Canada's highest peak, and it stands in the St. Elias Mountains in Kluane National Park. Seventeen of Canada's twenty tallest mountains are inside that one park, and its icefields are the largest outside the polar regions. British Columbia's highest ground isn't in the Rockies either. It's Fairweather Mountain, 4,663 m, on the Alaska border.

Now the ranges. The Rockies are layered sedimentary rock, limestone and shale, pushed up in slabs; their highest is Mount Robson at 3,954 m, British Columbia Parks says. The Coast Mountains are granite; Mount Waddington tops them at just over 4,000 m. East of the Rockies the highest ground is the Torngats of Labrador, about 1,650 m, on rock 3.9 billion years old.

Every province and territory has a high point, in Statistics Canada's Atlas of Canada table. Alberta's is Mount Columbia, 3,747 m. Nunavut's is Barbeau Peak on Ellesmere Island, 2,616 m. Saskatchewan's is the Cypress Hills. Ontario's is Ishpatina Ridge, only 693 m. New Brunswick's Mount Carleton is about 820 m, and Prince Edward Island tops out at about 140 m.

Find it on the map. The map now shows the Mount Robson sheet from Toporama, the Atlas of Canada's topographic viewer, with its brown contour lines. Each line joins points of equal height. Where the lines bunch tightly, the ground is steep; where they spread apart, it's gentle. The numbers on the lines are heights in metres, and they grow uphill. Follow them uphill to the summit's spot height. Now try a hill you know.

Let's change one fact. Move Mount Logan to Ontario. The province's highest point today is 693 m. Logan would climb nearly six kilometres above the Shield, through the cloud deck, into permanent snow, and you could see it from Toronto on a clear day. Height like that needs a plate boundary, and Ontario hasn't had one for a very long time.

The mistake people make is assuming the Rockies are Canada's highest mountains. They're the most famous and the easiest to reach, but the highest peaks are in the St. Elias Mountains of Yukon, and even in British Columbia the tallest ground sits on the Alaska border, not in Banff or Jasper.

Here's the rule, in one breath. Logan in the St. Elias, Robson in the Rockies, and on a map, tight contours mean steep.

This week, open Toporama, turn on the contour lines over the nearest hill you know, and count the lines from the bottom to the top. Multiply by the contour interval in the legend and you have its height.

Next time, the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence: five lakes, one wholly American, and a ninety-nine metre drop at Niagara.