Presented in the paper is a procedure to extract simplified triangular mesh from a height map (terrain data). The proposed algorithm works directly on a height map that extracts a simplified triangular mesh. For the simplification, the paper employs an iterative method of edge contractions. To determine an edge to be contracted, the contraction cost of an edge is evaluated through the QEM method. Normally, an edge contraction will remove two triangles sharing the edge. Although the edge contraction can be implemented easily on a triangular mesh, it is not viable to implement the operation on a height map due to the irregular topology. To handle the irregular topology during the simplification procedure, a new algorithm is introduced.