What is the difference...

[alpinerabbit]

... between a hill and a mountain?

for ride descriptions... I'm just wondering.

Distance? Steepness? amount of trees left on top?

So where do you draw the line?

[mimitabby]

to me, a hill is something that doesn't rise more than about 2000 feet.

good question!

The British Ordnance Survey once defined a mountain as having 1,000 feet of elevation and less was a hill, but the distinction was abandoned sometime in the 1920's. There was even a movie with this as its theme in the late 1990's - The Englishman That Went Up a Hill and Down a Mountain. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names once stated that the difference between a hill and a mountain in the U.S. was 1,000 feet of local relief, but even this was abandoned in the early 1970's. Broad agreement on such questions is essentially impossible, which is why there are no official feature classification standards.

Source of this FAQ:
http://gnis.usgs.gov

[Kano]

I found these definitions at answers.com:

Hill: A well-defined natural elevation smaller than a mountain.

Mountain: A natural elevation of the earth's surface having considerable mass, generally steep sides, and a height greater than that of a hill.

Either one of these makes me wonder where those invisible hills my legs keep finding fit in!

When searching google for "hill versus mountain" I found this article discussing the issue: http://www.mtnforum.org/rs/bulletins/mf-bulletin-2001-09.pdf

I still don't know!

Karen in Boise

[Torrilin]

Hills don't kill people. Mountains do.

A rise is anything too small to be a hill.

[Kalidurga]

If it makes you hurt, then it doesn't matter how you designate it ;)

[Triskeliongirl]

Hill climbs are of relatively short duration vs mountain climbs. While the grades encountered can be similar, mountain climbs just seem to go on forever.

[Deanna]

My personal definition is the presence of switch backs. Every mountain climb I've done seems to involve some sort of switch backs, hills don't.

[Zen]

If it makes you hurt, then it doesn't matter how you designate it ;)

There you go. It's all relative.

I also think it depends on your locality. There are places here that are officially named mountains but to a westerner they'd be hills.