Rocky Mountain is a park built vertically.
Ancient rock rose. Ice carved valleys and basins. Water reached a divide and moved toward opposite sides of a continent. Forest gave way to tundra. Animals adapted to narrower and colder worlds as elevation increased.
William Stanek's The Living Rocky Mountain Biography follows uplift, glaciation, headwaters, alpine ecology, wildlife, Indigenous corridors, settlement, tourism, road building, water engineering, park creation, management, climate, and the growing limits of high-country access.
The Continental Divide is more than a line across a map.
It is the organizing idea of a landscape where a few feet can change the destination of water-and a few thousand feet can change almost everything about life.
