Talk:Rocky Mountains

Moved from travellers' pub by (WT-en) Evan

I know something should change here, but I don't know exactly what. We have two overlapping articles, Rockies and Rocky Mountains (United States of America). I think the Rockies should be in here as a region independent of the US and Canada, but I'm not sure. (WT-en) Rhobite 19:30, 7 Nov 2003 (PST)

Yeah, so, Rocky Mountains (United States of America) is not actually about the mountains per se. It's one of the 10-12 major regions we used to split up the United States of America into usable chunks (like New England (United States of America), the Southwest (United States of America), etc.). Rockies was started a long time ago. Anyways, I don't really think travelers need a full article about the Rocky Mountain chain qua geological formation, any more than they need one about arugula, Metternich, or car alarms. See Project:What is an article? for details. If someone wanted to do an itinerary stretching from the USA to the Canadian Rockies, well, I guess that would make sense. But as of right now, I think Rockies should go. -- (WT-en) Evan 08:23, 8 Nov 2003 (PST)

What I think the Rocky Mountains article should include is an overview of the tourist sites and good places to go, and how to get there. I might want to know what the highest mountain is and which country it is in, or where the best skiing is, etc. While I do not see this article replacing the more specific country articles, the mountains stretch a long way. This article would be my first port of call to find some information. BTW: The redirect from Rockies is useful as an alternative spelling. -- (WT-en) Huttite 07:35, 12 Mar 2004 (EST)

One problem with this is that the Rockies are so durn big. I have been working lately on a number of articles relating to northern New Mexico, which contains the southernmost parts of the Rockies (specifically the Sangre de Cristo Mountains), and this area has roughly as much in common with the Canadian Rockies as, say, Florida has with British Columbia. How is one to package the information so that it's useful? Not obvious to me. "What the highest mountain is"? Isn't this better as a WikiPedia subject? "Where the best skiing is" -- this I can see, but is it really more efficient, from a traveler's perspective, than picking a region of the Rockies and asking the same question there? Because you don't travel to "the Rockies," you travel to part of them.

If someone from outside the area can give some suggestions on how to organize it, I'll expand the page when I get a minute, but being a local, I really don't know what a tourist would find useful. Incidentally, it is quite misleading to say the Rockies "extend down the western side" of North America. My home in the Rockies is nearly a thousand miles from the Pacific, with two major mountainous regions between here and there. I'll fix this, but that begs the question of just what the page is, or should be, actually good for. -- (WT-en) Bill-on-the-Hill 22:59, 12 Oct 2005 (EDT)