58 Fun Facts About The Rocky Mountains

The Rocky Mountains run some 3,000 miles south from western Canada and end in which US state?

New Mexico is where the Rockies give out in the south; the northern end is disputed, with some definitions stopping in British Columbia and others running on to the Brooks Range in Alaska.

What is the highest peak in the Rocky Mountains?

Mount Elbert is barely taller than its neighbour Mount Massive, so Massive's fans once piled rocks on its summit to overtake it, and Elbert's supporters climbed up and tore the cairn down.

Colorado's Mount Sneffels takes its name from a volcano in which Jules Verne novel?

Journey to the Center of the Earth sends its explorers down the crater of Iceland's Snæfell, the volcano whose name was borrowed for the Colorado fourteener.

Which warm, dry wind sweeps down the eastern slopes of the Rockies and can strip away winter snow in a day?

The Chinook warms as it sinks down the lee side after shedding its rain and snow on the Pacific slopes; one such wind lifted temperatures by 27°C in two minutes.

The modern Rockies were raised during which mountain-building episode?

The Laramide orogeny raised mountains unusually far from the coast, most likely because the ocean plate slid beneath the continent at a low angle instead of plunging steeply.

Which oceanic plate is thought to have slid at a shallow angle beneath North America, pushing mountain-building far inland?

The Farallon plate has since been almost entirely swallowed beneath the Americas; the small Juan de Fuca and Cocos plates off the Pacific coast are among its last remnants.

Which of these western ranges stands apart from the Rockies, on the far side of the Great Basin?

The Sierra Nevada wrings the moisture out of Pacific storms before they can travel inland, which is why the Great Basin between it and the Rockies is largely desert.

What is the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies?

Mount Robson was not climbed to the very top until 1913, when the guide Conrad Kain led the first complete ascent; a 1909 party's claim is now thought to have stopped short of the summit.

Lake Louise in Banff National Park is named after a daughter of which British monarch?

Queen Victoria's daughter Princess Louise Caroline Alberta was honoured in 1884; the railway workman who was led to the lake two years earlier had named it Emerald Lake.

Rocky Mountain spotted fever, first described in the valleys of Montana and Idaho, is spread by the bite of what?

A tick carries the bacterium, and despite the name the disease is now most common in the eastern United States, far from the Rockies.

Which peak, slightly taller than the Rockies' highest, is the highest in the contiguous United States?

Mount Whitney was named in 1864 by California's survey geologists after their own chief, Josiah Whitney, nine years before three local men made the first recorded climb to the top.

Which animal's pelts lured the fur trappers known as mountain men into the Rockies in the early 1800s?

Beaver fur was pressed into felt for fashionable hats, so when European taste moved on in the late 1830s, with the streams nearly trapped out, the mountain men's trade collapsed.

Which Colorado mountain inspired Katharine Lee Bates to write America the Beautiful in 1893?

Pikes Peak's summit view moved Bates, a visiting Wellesley professor, to write a poem that became a song only later, when it was set to a hymn tune by Samuel Ward.

Zebulon Pike's 1806 expedition into the southern Rockies set out during which president's time in office?

Thomas Jefferson was president, though the orders came from General James Wilkinson; Pike never reached the top of the peak named after him and ended the trip as a prisoner of Spanish soldiers.

What kind of line has carried tourists to the summit of Pikes Peak since 1891?

A cog railroad was the mattress maker Zalmon Simmons's answer to a miserable two-day mule ride up the mountain in 1888: he paid for the line himself and it opened three years later.

Which fourteener in Rocky Mountain National Park has a sheer East Face that climbers call the Diamond?

Longs Peak is the park's only fourteener, and the Diamond stayed officially closed to climbers until 1960, when Dave Rearick and Bob Kamps made the first ascent of the wall.

Whose surveying party made the first recorded ascent of Longs Peak in 1868?

John Wesley Powell made the climb one-handed: a bullet at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862 had cost him his right forearm six years earlier.

Which president gives his name to the Colorado tunnel that carries Interstate 70 beneath the Continental Divide?

Dwight D. Eisenhower championed the 1956 law that created the Interstates; the tunnel named for him opened in 1973 and spared drivers the extra miles of the old road over Loveland Pass.

Water from Triple Divide Peak in Montana can reach the Atlantic, the Pacific and which third body of water?

Hudson Bay takes the runoff from the peak's north-east side, because the summit is where the Continental Divide meets a second divide that walls off the rivers of northern Canada.

Which mountain range in north-eastern Utah, reaching slightly into Wyoming, is part of the Rockies?

The Uintas help fill the Great Salt Lake: their snowmelt feeds the Bear River, which ends in a lake with no outlet, where the water evaporates and leaves its salt behind.

Which Wyoming range, the youngest in the Rockies, is still being lifted by earthquakes along a fault at its foot?

The Teton Range rises with each big earthquake on the fault, which lifts the peaks a few feet and drops the valley of Jackson Hole even more; it has been at it for less than 10 million years.

Which Canadian city in the foothills of the Rockies hosted the 1988 Winter Olympics?

Some of Calgary's most popular athletes were not medal contenders at all: British ski jumper Eddie 'the Eagle' Edwards and the Jamaican bobsleigh team, whose debut inspired the film Cool Runnings.

What gives glacier-fed mountain lakes such as Lake Louise their milky turquoise colour?

Rock flour is stone ground to powder beneath moving glaciers, fine enough to hang in the meltwater instead of sinking; the more of it a lake receives, the milkier its turquoise.

Which Colorado mountains hold the Rockies' highest peak and neighbouring Mount Massive?

The Sawatch Range has a middle stretch known as the Collegiate Peaks, because its fourteeners carry the names of universities, among them Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

Which bird of the Rockies' alpine tundra turns white each winter to match the snow?

Ptarmigan, feathered right down to their toes, change coats again when the snow melts, moulting to a mottled brown and grey that hides them among the tundra's rocks.

Which large deer of the Rocky Mountains is also known by the Shawnee name wapiti?

Elk is a name colonists carried over from Europe, where it means the animal North Americans call a moose; wapiti avoids the mix-up.

Which animal of the Rockies settles mating rights with head-on charges whose crash can carry for a mile?

Bighorn sheep had dwindled to a few thousand by 1900 as settlers and their livestock spread through the West, and the herds have only partly recovered since.

In 1875 a swarm of which insect, now extinct, crossed the plains east of the Rockies in a mass larger than California?

Locusts of the Rocky Mountain species numbered an estimated 12.5 trillion in that swarm, the greatest concentration of animals Guinness has on record, yet within about thirty years the species had died out.

Yellowstone is the only place in the United States where which animal has roamed wild continuously since prehistoric times?

Bison held on there even after poachers had cut the herd to about two dozen animals by 1902; the US Army, then running the park, guarded the survivors.

Which city at the foot of the Rockies did the Spanish make a capital in 1610?

Santa Fe is the oldest state capital in the United States; in 1846 its defenders withdrew and General Stephen Kearny's army took the city without a shot being fired.

Who crossed the Rockies and reached the Pacific overland in 1793, the first European to cross the continent north of Mexico?

Alexander Mackenzie marked his arrival by writing his name and the date, 22 July 1793, on a rock at the edge of the Pacific, near Bella Coola.

Sacagawea helped Lewis and Clark bargain for horses with which people, her own, before they crossed the Rockies?

Shoshone horses carried the party over the mountains after Sacagawea greeted the band's chief, Cameahwait, as her brother, a reunion that eased the bargaining.

Which fur-trading rival of the Hudson's Bay Company built Rocky Mountain House in present-day Alberta in 1799?

The North West Company used the post as David Thompson's base for crossing the Rockies in 1807; after the two rivals merged in 1821, the Hudson's Bay Company ran it under its own name.

Benjamin Bonneville led the first wagon train across the Rockies in 1832 through which gap in Wyoming?

South Pass became the gateway to the West: between 1841 and 1869 some 350,000 to 500,000 emigrants bound for Oregon, California and Utah followed those first wagons over it.

Which river is born where the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin rivers meet in the Rockies of Montana?

The Missouri's three forks were named by Meriwether Lewis when his expedition reached them in July 1805, after more than a year of working its boats upstream.

Which state capital in the Rockies grew from an 1864 gold camp called Last Chance Gulch?

Helena's main street now runs along Last Chance Gulch, where a party of prospectors known as the Four Georgians struck gold in July 1864.

Banff, Canada's first national park, was set aside in 1885 to protect what, found by railway workers two years earlier?

Hot springs on Sulphur Mountain looked like easy money to the workers, who fenced them off and built a cabin; the government ended the squabble over ownership by reserving the land for the public.

Which railway built Chateau Lake Louise and a grand hotel at Banff to lure tourists to the Rockies?

Canadian Pacific's William Van Horne saw the hotels as a way to fill his trains: luxury lodges along the line would draw wealthy travellers across the country by rail.

Which Colorado silver-boom town, more than 10,000 feet up, is the highest incorporated city in the United States?

Leadville did not exist until a silver boom in the late 1870s, which lured tens of thousands of people and made the fortune of Horace Tabor, the 'Leadville Silver King'.

What did the railway build in 1909 to tame the 4.5 percent Big Hill on the Kicking Horse Pass?

Two spiral tunnels let the line corkscrew inside the mountains and cut the grade to about half; before them, three safety spurs stood ready to catch runaway trains on the Big Hill.

What is the largest uninterrupted glacial mass in the Rockies?

The Columbia Icefield acts as a water tower for western Canada: its meltwater feeds the Athabasca, North Saskatchewan and Columbia river systems, which run off to different sides of the continent.

Which national park, Banff's neighbour to the north, is the largest in the Canadian Rockies?

Jasper takes its name from Jasper Hawse, a fur trader who ran a supply post there in the early 1800s that travellers came to call Jasper's House.

Glacier in Montana and Waterton Lakes in Alberta together became the world's first what, in 1932?

The International Peace Park was the idea of Rotary clubs in Alberta and Montana, whose members met at Waterton in 1931 and lobbied both governments to join the two parks.

Which road across Rocky Mountain National Park is the highest continuous paved road in the United States?

Trail Ridge Road, which tops out at 12,183 feet, was built from 1929 to give the park's growing crowds a safer way over the Continental Divide than the old Fall River Road.

The Climax mine, high in the Colorado Rockies, was once the world's largest producer of which metal?

Molybdenum baffled the prospectors who found the deposit in 1879 and took the grey ore for graphite; decades passed before steelmakers learned that it hardens steel and the mine went to work.

A stay at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park, inspired which Stephen King novel?

The Shining's Overlook Hotel was modelled on the Stanley, built by F.O. Stanley, co-inventor of the Stanley Steamer car, who had come to Colorado's dry mountain air for his health.

Which range of the Rockies rises straight from the Great Plains behind Boulder and Colorado Springs?

The Front Range cities hold most of Colorado's people, but most of the state's rain and snow falls west of the Continental Divide, so water is piped 13 miles beneath it to reach them.

What is the highest summit in Wyoming, in the Wind River Range?

Gannett Peak tops the far more famous Grand Teton by only about 30 feet, but it stands deep in a remote wilderness with glaciers on its flanks.

What lies beneath Yellowstone, supplying the heat that drives its geysers?

A supervolcano fed by magma close to the surface has blown apart three times in about two million years; the last of those eruptions left a crater so wide that much of Yellowstone Lake lies inside it.

Which great river of the Southwest begins as snowmelt in Colorado's San Juan Mountains?

The Rio Grande is so heavily tapped to irrigate farmland that most of its water never reaches the Gulf of Mexico; south of the border it goes by another name, the Río Bravo.

What natural wonder, the tallest of its kind in North America, lies at the foot of Colorado's Sangre de Cristo Mountains?

A sand dune some 700 feet high stands there because winds crossing the San Luis Valley drop their sand where the mountains block the way, and storm winds blowing back through the passes pile it higher.

Which famous concert venue in the Colorado foothills is walled by two 300-foot sandstone slabs tilted up by mountain-building?

Red Rocks Amphitheatre was built in the 1930s by young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era jobs programme, and has hosted acts from the Beatles onward since it opened in 1941.

Which Rocky Mountain tree turns whole hillsides gold each autumn, its groves often a single plant joined at the roots?

Quaking aspen sends up new trunks from its roots, so a whole grove can be one plant; Utah's Pando is a single male aspen of some 47,000 trunks sharing one root system.

Which small mammal of the Rockies' high rock slides dries 'haystacks' of plants for winter?

Pikas, small relatives of the rabbit, do not hibernate: they stay active beneath the snow all winter, living on the piles of plants they cut and dried in summer.

Which pine of the drier southern Rockies is harvested for its edible nuts?

Pinyon pine seeds are the pine nuts gathered for centuries by Native peoples of the Southwest, and the trees depend on pinyon jays, which bury thousands of seeds and leave the uneaten ones to sprout.

Which Montana city in the Rockies grew up beside a copper lode billed as the Richest Hill on Earth?

Butte began as a gold and silver camp, but it was copper, mined from the 1880s by the Anaconda Company, that made its fortune.

Which Colorado ski resort was co-founded in 1962 by Pete Seibert, a wartime army ski trooper who had trained nearby?

Vail lies near Camp Hale, where Seibert trained with the army's Tenth Mountain Division; its veterans came home from the war in Italy and founded ski areas across the country.

Which John Denver song is one of Colorado's two official state songs?

Rocky Mountain High was adopted in 2007, decades after some listeners took it for a drug song; Denver said its high was simply the joy of being in the mountains.