Ontario County High Points

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List Description

Ontario is administratively divided into 51 units that are a mixture of counties, unified counties, regional municipalities, districts, cities, and municipalities. Most of them were historically counties at one point, and despite changes in name or status, the boundaries have remained mostly stable over the years.

These units also correspond to the Canadian Census Divisions for the most part. Since the last revision of Census Divisions in 2001, the combined county of Haldimand-Norfolk split into Haldimand County and Norfolk County, and the City of Brantford separated from Brant County. That is why there are 51 entiries on this list, while the Census lists only 49 Divisions.

Sources

The main source for the Ontario county high point list was the excellent Ontario Basic Mapping database system created by the provincial government, which is a huge improvement over the old NTS 1:50,000 map sheets. To help generate this list, all the spot elevations (over 500,000 of them) in the OBM data were downloaded, matched to their county by a point-in-polygon operation, and the highest spot elevations picked out. Sometimes there was a swarm of spot elevations of the same height in the same general location, and one represenative point was picked. In other cases, separate areas were logged (see, for example, Chatham-Kent). Also, some OBM spot elevations were clearly erroneous outliers and had to be discarded. In general, though, a 1-meter difference in spot elevations was considered significant, and these lower points were not considered high-point candidates.

Once a set of county high points was generated, they were cross-checked with the 1:50,000 NTS maps, and some were adjusted a little bit based on information there. The result should be a reasonably accurate guide to the highest ground in the counties. Before tackling any county, though, be sure to check the OBM and NTS maps yourself to familiarlize yourself with the area. You may have to check out several nearby areas to be sure of locating the highest piece of earth, an occupational hazard of highpointers in relatively flat terrain like Ontario.

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