Rocky Mountains

The rocky mountains of North America claim many conservation firsts. The U.S. Congress established Yellowstone as the world's first national park in 1872. Less than 20 years later, Canada designated its own first national park in Banff in 1887 (a small reservation for the “sanitary” mineral springs in the Banff town site had already been established in 1885). Canada would go on to establish the world's first governmental park agency in 1911. One of the first successful efforts to save an endangered species, the bison (Bison bison), occurred in the Rocky Mountains. Canada and the United States established the world's first “peace park” in 1932: The Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park.

As the major feature of the Laramide orogeny, a term geologists use to designate the period of mountain building in the West that lasted from the Cretaceous to the mid-Tertiary (80–35 million years ago), the Rocky Mountains are a familiar geological formation to most North Americans. Yet the geologic Rockies do not translate into a widely accepted geographical area. Some have defined the Rocky Mountains as extending from northern British Columbia south to New Mexico, while others see the Rockies as commencing in the Brooks Range of Alaska all the way through Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental (although inclusion of this latter range is uncommon). Thus, the Rocky Mountains stretch between 3,000 kilometers to nearly 7,000 kilometers on a north-to-south arc across the continent.

Lack of agreement among geographers, scientists, and conservationists over the geographical expanse of the Rockies extends to the delineation of subregions (sometimes called “bioregions” or “ecoregions,” although scientists have yet to adopt strict definitions for these terms). In addition to the “Arctic Rockies” (the aforementioned Brooks Range) and the Sierra Madre Occidental, other widely used designations include the Southern Rockies, the Central Rockies, and the Northern Rockies.

In an international context, however, this loose terminology has led to confusion. For example, the term “Northern Rockies” carries significantly different connotations in the United States than it does in Canada. Canadians think of the “Northern Rockies” as the mostly untouched and rugged terrain of northern British Columbia, while in the United States the term refers to the Rocky Mountains of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and northeastern Washington.

Conservationists have approached the region from a number of perspectives, including ecology, biogeography, human culture, and politics. Probably the most comprehensive conservation effort to parse the landscape of the Rockies has come under the aegis of the Wildlands Project, a conservation initiative whose mission is to maintain and restore a system of large, connected protected areas throughout the North American continent. Of these Rocky Mountain subregions, by far the largest in geographical extent is the Yellowstone to Yukon (or “Y2Y”) region. Others include the “Heart of the West” (roughly southeast Idaho, southwest Wyoming, northwest Colorado, and northeast Utah), the “Southern Rockies Wildlands Network” (mostly the Colorado Rockies, extending north into Wyoming and south into New Mexico), the New Mexico Highlands, and the northern Sierra Madre.

Although the biological sciences have weighed heavily in these regional designations, they are ultimately heuristic and not the only approach. Cutting across ecosystems are watersheds. The Rocky [Page 1530]Mountains are home to the headwaters of North America's greatest rivers: the Porcupine/Yukon, the Columbia, the Fraser, the Missouri/Mississippi, the Colorado, and the Rio Grande. They link the Rockies and some species to the Pacific Ocean and Gulfs of Mexico and California. A watershed approach looks quite different than one with a terrestrial emphasis.

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