Rocky Mountain

The Rocky Mountains, often called the Rockies, are a broad mountain range in western North America. The Rocky Mountains stretch more than 4,800 kilometers (3,000 miles) from northernmost British Columbia, in Canada, to New Mexico, in the United States. more...

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The highest peak is Mount Elbert, in Colorado, which is 14,440 feet (4,401 meters) above sea level. Mount Robson in British Columbia, at 3,954 meters (12,972 feet) is the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies. The Rocky Mountain System within the United States is a United States physiographic region. Though part of the Pacific Cordillera, they are not to be confused with the Pacific Coast Ranges which are located immediately adjacent to the Pacific coast.

In the United States, the more impressive rise above the Great Plains include the Front Range from northern Colorado to northern New Mexico, in Wyoming along the Wind River Range and Big Horn Mountains, and in Montana with the Crazy Mountains and along the Rocky Mountain Front which extends into extreme southwestern Alberta, Canada (known there as the Clark Range). The Wasatch Range near Salt Lake City, Utah divides the Great Basin from the mountains in the west.

Geography and geology

See also: Geography of the United States Rocky Mountain System and Geology of the Rocky Mountains

The Rocky Mountains are commonly defined to stretch from the Liard River in British Columbia south to the Rio Grande in New Mexico. Other mountain ranges continue beyond those two rivers, including the Selwyn Range in Yukon, the Brooks Range in Alaska, and the Sierra Madre in Mexico, but those are not part of the Rockies, though they are part of the American cordillera. The United States definition of the Rockies, however, includes the Cabinet and Salish Mountains of Idaho and Montana, whereas their counterparts north of the Kootenai River, the Columbia Mountains, are considered a separate system in Canada, lying to the west of the huge Rocky Mountain Trench, which runs the length of British Columbia from its beginnings in the middle Flathead River valley in western Montana.

The younger ranges of the Rocky Mountains uplifted during the late Cretaceous period (100 million-65 million years ago), although some portions of the southern mountains date from uplifts during the Precambrian (3,980 million-600 million years ago). The mountains' geology is a complex of igneous and metamorphic rock; younger sedimentary rock occurs along the margins of the southern Rocky Mountains, and volcanic rock from the Tertiary (65 million-1.8 million years ago) occurs in the San Juan Mountains and in other areas. Millennia of severe erosion in the Wyoming Basin transformed intermountain basins into a relatively flat terrain. The Tetons and other north-central ranges contain folded and faulted rocks of Paleozoic and Mesozoic age draped above cores of Proterozoic and Archean igneous and metamorphic rocks ranging in age from 1.2 billion (e.g., Tetons) to more than 3.3 billion years (Beartooth Mountains).

Read more at Wikipedia.org