Which State Has the Most Mountains over 10k Feet?
I was recently asked which state has the most mountains over 10,000 feet. I guessed Colorado, but was surprised to hear that it is allegedly Nevada.
If you Google this, you can find some evidence for it, in particular this Opinion piece from the Great Falls Tribune, which states:
If measured by the state with the number of named mountain ranges, then the distinction goes to Nevada, according to a member of Blurtit.com, an online question and answer community.
“Nevada has more than 300 named mountain ranges, all running north-south as part of the Great Basin complex. Elevations range from 2,000 to 3,000 feet. The state has the most number of peaks above 10,000 feet. “
Great Falls Tribune edit board
While I don’t doubt that Nevada has a large number of mountain ranges, I found it hard to believe that Nevada had the most peaks above 10,000 feet, particularly because California contains the bulk of the Sierra Nevada range, and Colorado is known for its many 14,000 foot peaks and has significant areas of land above 10,000 feet in elevation.
Curious to find the answer, I looked at topographic data and mountain summit data to dig into it further. From that, here are my findings: Colorado, not Nevada, has the most mountains over 10,000 feet tall.
Running the Numbers
The first source I looked at was summit data from the Environmental Systems Research Institute. It provided data on mountain peaks, including height in meters and the state and county in which each peak is located. Filtering down the dataset to mountains over 3048 meters (10k feet), here’s how many peaks there are in each state:
| State | Number of 10,ooo foot Mountains |
| Colorado | 1,593 |
| California | 506 |
| Wyoming | 474 |
| Utah | 265 |
| Montana | 230 |
| New Mexico | 169 |
| Idaho | 119 |
| Nevada | 117 |
| Alaska | 108 |
| Hawaii | 38 |
| Arizona | 25 |
| Washington | 13 |
| Oregon | 5 |
The number for Nevada from this data closely matches that of this list on Peakbagger.com, which lists 134 peaks above 10,000 feet.
The Colorado number appears harder to verify, but if anything appears vastly undercounted relative to the numbers listed in this article. That link mentions 48 14k footers, 804 13k footers, 1,062 12k footers, 716 11k footers, and 527 10k footers (with at least 300′ clear prominence).
Perhaps the quote above listing Nevada on top is incorporating some sort of prominence metric, but it seems hard to justify putting Nevada on top when there are 7 other states with more 10k footers.
Visualizing
This question gave me a good opportunity to play around with RASTER data, where I used elevation data from the USGS and to map that data alongside state boundary polygons and the summit point data mentioned above. As you can see from the map, Colorado clearly has the most mountains over 10k feet, which are marked in blue.
Below is a map without the mountains.
