This week I decided to stay homebound, as I've been traveling internationally a lot lately! I took a trip to the Rocky Mountains, the place of inspiration for so many country songs, and an area of extreme beauty. Although the Rockies start in Canada, I visited the region further south, in New Mexico, USA.
There, I learned that the core areas of the mountain range are formed by continental crust that is over 1 billion years old. In the case of this mountain range, the rocks were already in existence before the converging plate shift raised them up into a series of mountains. The shift that caused this was called the Laramide orogeny. After the initial rising up of the mountain range, glaciers solidified the current shape by moving over the rocks and eroding them to an extent. The result is a beautiful series of towering mountains that make for amazing hiking, with lots of lakes and steep valleys
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