Landforms of the American West Fine Art Print Map

Most of the West is now understood to be an assembly of accretions, grafted by tectonic forces onto an ancient North American core— a work in progress. The whole region is dominated by the two great mountain systems, separated in the U.S. and Mexico by very many lowlands, plateaus, and lesser ranges.

The Canadian border corresponds closely to the southern edge of Hudson Bay’s drainage basin, while the Mississippi drains the rest of the eastern slope all the way south to the upper reaches of the Red. The Fraser, Columbia-Snake, and Colorado systems cover most of the West, with the notable exceptions of the Great Basin and Wyoming’s Great Divide Basin.

Coverage includes all of the eleven western states (Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona, and Colorado), and extends east well into the high plains, up into Canada as far as Edmonton, and down into Mexico past Chihuahua. About half of Texas is shown, including all of the Panhandle and the border as far down as Eagle Pass / Piedras Negras.