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Don’t Confuse Your Highland and Highlands

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One should never confuse the Town of Highlands in Orange County (containing West Point, Bear Mountain, and Bear Mountain Bridge on the Hudson River) with the Town of Highland in Sullivan County (containing Barryville, Eldred, Highland Lake, Minisink Ford and Yulan on Delaware River), with the Hamlet of Highland in the Town of Lloyd in Ulster County (which also borders the Hudson River, and contains the Mid-Hudson Bridge to Poughkeespie).

The hamlet of Highland is pronounced as two seperate words — “high land”, stressing the syllables. In contrast, the Town of Highland in Sullivan County and Highlands in Orange County rhymes with “island”.

You can also drive from Ulster County to Orange County to Sullivan County, without ever crossing any other counties.

Catskills are Highly Tree Covered

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While certainly not a surprise to most observers, the Catskill Mountains are largely wild, without much housing development or agriculture. Tree covered areas are a deeper green, while cleared areas are white or clear.

Finding Peaks …

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Finding Peaks …

Algonquin Peak

After studying the methods quite a bit, I’ve determined there is no real easy way to find peaks on mountains and report their exact elevation in QGIS. The best method I could come up with was to figure out the median point in the elevation for the map, then use that to isolate “mountains” and from there polygonize, create zonal statistics for each polygon, crop the DEM layer to each polygon then select the pixel that matched the peak. This can be done, but I couldn’t figure out how to automate it easily using the Graphical Modeler, so I would have to write a full plugin to do it. I decided it wasn’t worth the effort. In most cases, I didn’t care about the exact peak, and it would just be easier to add peaks to my maps on a case-by-case basis using a point layer with labels queried against the DEM layer.

Point 42, -74

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The spot on the map you end up in Eastern NY when you are using unprojected coordinates in Eastern NY and forget to cast as a float. I wonder how many people end up at Glenhurst Stock Farm when their GPS or mapping program goes nutty.