Rocky Mountains (1439)

This system of parallel mountain ranges stretches down the western side of North America from Alaska to New Mexico. For long the Rockies cut off the Pacific seaboard of Canada and the United States from the rest of North America. In the early 19th century they were visited only by bears, pumas, deer and other fur-bearing animals. Later, the discovery of gold, copper, coal, silver, lead and iron, etc. led to the building of roads and railroads.

Within the Rocky Mountains there are many national parks where trees, plants, animals and birds are protected. The largest of these is the Yellowstone national park in Wyoming, with its great Geysers, its herds of bison, deer and antelope. Then there are the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, and the Glacier National Park in Montana. The latter has about sixty small glaciers and hundreds of alpine lakes in its rugged mountains.

Among all the wonders and curiosities of the Rockies, two perhaps deserve mentioning. One is the grizzly bear, now a rather rare inhabitant, whose fierceness and shyness, great size and extreme deftness in moving have made him almost a legendary animal.

The other is the greatest redwood tree in the world or sequoia, with its amazingly tall, straight trunk, branchless for hundreds of feet from the ground. Sequoias are some of the oldest and biggest living things on earth. They grow sometimes to one hundred meters high. Sequoias are evergreen trees, having a very tough bark of about 15 centimetres thick. The fireproof bark helped Sequoias live through many forest fires.

Several great rivers rise in the Rocky Mountains, including the Colorado, the Columbia, the Rio Grande and several of the great tributaries of the Mississippi.

Check your comprehension.

1. Where are the Rocky Mountains situated? 2. What led to the building of roads in the Rocky Mountains? 3. What made the grizzly bear almost a legendary animal? 4. What kind of bark has sequoia? 5. What is the role of national parks?

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The U.S. Wonders

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