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The Rocky Mountains, commonly known as the Rockies, are a major mountain range in western North America. The Rocky Mountains stretch more than 3,000 miles from the north part of British Columbia, in western Canada, to New Mexico, in the southwestern United States. Within the North America the Rockies are distinct from the Pacific Coast Ranges and the Cascade Range and Sierra Nevada which all lie farther west. The Rocky Mountains were formed from 80 million to 55 million years ago during the Laramide orogeny, in which a number of plates began to slide underneath the North American plate. This resulted in a broad belt of mountains running down western North America. Since then, further tectonic activity and erosion by glaciers have sculpted the Rockies into large mountains and with valleys. At the end of the last ice age, humans started to inhabit the mountain range. After Europeans, like Sir Alexander Mackenzie and Americans, like Lewis and Clark, started to explore the range, minerals and furs drove the initial economic exploitation of the mountains, although the range itself never became densely populated.
Currently, much of the mountain range is protected by public parks and forest lands, and is a popular tourist spot. The eastern edge of the Rockies rises above the Interior Plains of central North America, including the Front Range of Colorado, the Wind River Range and Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming, the Absaroka-Beartooth ranges and Rocky Mountain Front of Montana, Dunnick's Peak, and the Clark Range of Alberta. The Muskwa and Hart Ranges together are known as the Northern Rockies. The western edge of the Rockies includes ranges such as the Wasatch near Salt Lake City and the Bitterroots near Idaho. The Great Basin and Columbia River Plateau separate these from distinct ranges further to the west, which are the Sierra Nevada, Cascade Range and Coast Mountains. The Rockies do not extend into the Yukon or Alaska. The Rocky Mountain System within the