Saddle (landform)

A saddle is the low area of a ridge between two hills or mountain summits. It surrounds the saddle point, the lowest point on the line of the drainage divide that joins the two peaks. Seen along the divide it is the lowest ground between the summits, while seen across the divide it is the high point of the land that falls away on either side, which is why a road, track or railway crossing between two massifs will usually go over the saddle. A saddle can be a sharp narrow gap or a broad shallow dip. The height of a summit above its highest saddle, the key saddle, measures the prominence of that summit. The word col is related but its relationship to saddle is not universally agreed. In structural geology, a saddle is also a depression along the axis of an anticline.