North America Physical Map
A free printable physical map of North America, with elevation shown in color and shaded relief. The labeled version names the mountain ranges, deserts, plains, rivers, seas and highest peaks. The blank version leaves them off for students to fill in.
Highest Point
Denali, Alaska
20,310 ft
Lowest Point
Death Valley, California
282 ft below sea level
Choose your version
Labeled or blank.
Both are free PDFs sized for US Letter paper.
Labeled
Ranges, deserts, plains, rivers, lakes, seas and the highest peaks, all named. Use it as a reference or an answer key.
downloadLabeled PDF
Blank
The same terrain with no names and a name line at the top, for students to label the features themselves.
downloadBlank PDFThe physical geography of North America
A wide belt of mountains runs down the western side of North America from Alaska to Mexico. It includes the Alaska Range, the Coast Mountains, the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada and Mexico’s Sierra Madre. The center of the continent is a vast lowland: the Great Plains, the Mississippi basin and, farther north, the rocky Canadian Shield around Hudson Bay. The Appalachian Mountains, much older and lower, run along the east. Greenland, the world’s largest island, is almost entirely covered by ice. Central America and the islands of the Caribbean lie to the south.
Major rivers
- Mississippi
- Missouri
- Mackenzie
- Yukon
- St. Lawrence
- Colorado
- Rio Grande
- Columbia
Find it on the map
- The mountain belt along the whole west side
- The five Great Lakes
- Hudson Bay cutting deep into Canada
Built from real data, not stock images.
The terrain is drawn from a global elevation model (Mapzen terrain tiles, built from NASA SRTM and other public surveys). Coastlines, rivers, lakes and feature names come from Natural Earth. All eight of our US, continent and world physical maps use the same elevation colors, so they can be compared with each other.
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