Inspired by this thread in which I opine that Florida contains a spot that is in the top four furthest places away from a mountain that you can get to by land. The tip of Florida seems to be more than 700 miles away from North Georgia which seems to be the closest mountains. By “Mountain” I mean something that rises at least 1000 feet from nearby terrain (so slowly rising plateaux don’t count.)
Just looking at a map I’d give over a 50/50 chance of perhaps being beaten somewhere in the middle of the Sahaha.
Perhaps also somewhere in north east central Canada, but I do not know which regions of the Canadian Shield qualify as “mountains” enough to make a call.
Google Maps doesn’t have a good topo map of Antarctica and I don’t know enough about the geography of Siberia and Australia to even know where to look to confirm this.
You may have some serious competition with Ontario, Canada. It is a gigantic province even by North American standards and its highest point, Ishpatina Ridge, is only 984 feet above the surrounding terrain. Its neighbor, Manitoba doesn’t have any true mountains either. I am not sure where the maximum distance from a mountain (by your definition) is but one contender may be somewhere near the northern-center of Ontario close to the Hudson bay maybe a little closer to the Manitoba side if straight line distances to Quebec are an issue. The distance on Google Maps appears to me to be longer than southern Florida to northern Georgia. I may be wrong but I don’t know of any mountains or significant peaks that are within 700 miles of that general area.
I specified land distance, trying to eliminate remote, flat islands. I perhaps didn’t specify enough that the land journey had to be possible in which case a flat island would be infinite
Seems to me anywhere on a line from roughly Dallas to Duluth and on up into Ontario as far as Hudson’s bay is farther from mountains than Miami is. There’s plenty of rolling hills out there, but the total elevation difference from peak to trough is just a few hundred feet. So IMO those would be disqualified for the same reason you’d disqualify high plateaux.
I didn’t poke into the rest of the planet thoroughly, but there’s a lot of mostly flat land in Brazil as well. A spot along Brazil’s coast is a very long way from the mountains at Brazil’s western borders.
Harney Peak (or the original name, Hinhan Kaga) is the highest point in South Dakota (and the Black Hills) with an elevation of 7,244 feet and prominence of 2,922 feet.
West Siberian Plain is located east of Ural Mountains mostly in the territory of Russia. It covers an area of more than 975,000 sq.mi. It has been described as the world’s largest unbroken lowland—more than 50 percent is less than 330 feet (100 m) above sea level —and covers an area of about 2.6–2.7 million km² which is about one third of Siberia, extending from north to south for 1490 mi (2,400 km), from the Arctic Ocean to the foothills of the Altay Mountains, and from west to east for 1,180 mi (1,900 km) from the Yenisei River to the Ural Mountains.
So, in that area - if you were in the right spot somewhere near the center of the region, it could be at least 550 miles to the nearest mountains
