The Rocky Mountains form a gigantic mountain barrier that stretches for nearly 5000 kilometers, from New Mexico in the USA to British Columbia in Canada. Culminating in Colorado with Mount Elbert at 4401 meters above sea level, it successively created the mountain ranges of Wyoming, Montana and Alberta. The American Rockies, with its history of the Wild West, its cowboys, its Indian tributes and its geothermal phenomena and the Canadian Rockies with its cut peaks, its glaciers and its lakes, are of exceptional natural beauty and rightly they are recognized around the world for the splendor of their landscapes and their biodiversity.