On a high, hot, and arid Boulder summer day, it may be comforting to remember that a mere 70 million years ago, this was beachfront property. For hundreds of millions of years, inland seas rose and receded in central Colorado, pushed around by the emerging Rocky Mountains. When the mountains became the unquestioned victor, the ocean drained away east and west, leaving the western edge of an endless high prairie pressing against an abrupt wall of mountain where the region’s history is written in rock.
For far longer than humans have recorded, plants and animals lived, fed, were fed upon, reproduced, and adapted to the complex ecosystem of the high plains, the mountains, and the wetlands. In the areas where they’ve been left to it, the cycles continue.
The increasingly frantic scribbling of human settlement on that big canvas may now seem to dominate the landscape, but the mountains and the prairies remember where they came from.