High Country A forbidding Arctic-like environment exists on the Rockies summits. An amazing variety of plants and animals are able to grow and survive there despite the winter cold, the incessant winds and the harsh sunlight.
Lichens grow on bare rockfaces, and tenacious alpine flowers find a precarious roothold.
We can also find the caribou which seeks out the lichen as food, the timid rock-rabbit called the pika and the monarch of the Rockies, the grizzly bear. The sure footed, seclusive mountain goat adapts to the hostile surroundings. The meeting place of two contrasting environments, where the high country tundra meets mountain forest. It is a mingling of plant zones rather than a clear demarcation between them. Brightly coloured tundra flowers like monkshood, paintbrushes and monkey flowers bloom beside solitary spruce and pine.