The Rockies

A wind-carved mountain spine of jagged ridgelines, high-country towns, ranching valleys, and long highways threading between evergreen shadows. The range reads as an 1,800-mile corridor of motion and friction — the route Pluie travels up and down, folding wilderness into human habitations: fences rubbing shoulders with highway shoulders, weathered stops, and ranch houses that guard grazing claims. Smell of pine and diesel rides the cold air; distant howls answer the clang of gate chains. Politically charged in the Roosevelt Room pitch, the Rockies carry both natural grandeur and the raw consequence of human choices, including the killing that reframes migration as contested ground.