Most of the previous studies related to land surface temperature (LST) are mainly focused on the investigation of urban heat island; however, little has been done on the mountainous area that are usually far away from cities. In this study, using the Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) at Mount Tai, firstly, the LST was retrieved based on the Mono-window Algorithm; and then the impacts on the LST from several factors including the topography, normalized difference moisture index (NDMI) and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) were analyzed though correlation analysis; accordingly, the regression equation between LST and topographic factors as well as NDMI was developed by stepwise regression analysis, the variable coefficients in the regression equation were interpreted using nonstandard regression coefficient, and then the impact of each factor on LST was quantized by partial correlation coefficient. The results show that: 1) In summer, elevation significantly affects the LST and has a significantly negative natural logarithm correlation rather than a negative linear correlation with it. However, the influence of slope, aspect and incident solar energy is not very significant, LST has a weak correlation with each of them; 2) NDVI and NDMI effectively express LST in mountainous areas if water is absent on surface. LST and NDVI have a negative quadratic correlation. In addition, with the increase of NDVI, the LSTs over areas covered by dense vegetation (NDVI > 0.5) will appear a "saturation" phenomenon. Meanwhile, LST and NDMI have a simple but stable negative linear correlation. When compared with NDVI, NDMI is more effective and more applicable at a large scale for the expression of LST;3) The comprehensive analysis shows that land surface moisture characteristic is the main factor affecting the LST, and then followed by the elevation. In comparison with the impacts of these two primary factors, those from the other factors are relatively insignificant. These results will provide important information on the examination of the spatial pattern and mechanism of LST across mountainous areas.