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60 free The Rocky Mountains trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Rocky Mountains trivia quiz covers the range that runs 3,000 miles from northern British Columbia to New Mexico. The easy questions are the ones any road-tripper knows: the state with the most high peaks, the world's first national park, the divide that sends rivers to two oceans, and the mountain that inspired America the Beautiful. From there it moves through how the Rockies formed, the Cree name behind the English one, the explorers who first crossed them, the fur traders and gold rushes, and the railways that opened Banff and Glacier to tourists. The harder end is for geographers and peak-baggers: the exact height of Mount Elbert and why it was revised, the most prominent peak in the range, the trench that pilots use as a highway, the pass with 4.5 percent gradients that needed spiral tunnels, the peak whose water reaches three oceans, the highest paved road on the continent, and the locust swarm that Guinness lists as the largest gathering of animals ever seen before the species vanished. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the range, its peaks, parks and passes before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Rocky Mountain National Park, Yellowstone and US geography quizzes next.
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Q 01Roughly how far do the Rocky Mountains stretch in a straight line from northern Canada to New Mexico?
3,000 miles
They are the easternmost part of the North American Cordillera and its largest mountain system.
Q 02What is the highest peak in the Rocky Mountains?
Mount Elbert
At 14,440 ft it is also the highest point in the whole Mississippi River drainage basin.
Q 03How many fourteeners does Colorado have, the most of any US state?
53
Alaska is second with 29; all 96 US fourteeners lie west of the Mississippi.
Q 04The English name Rocky Mountains is a translation of a name from which Indigenous language?
Plains Cree
The French form montagnes de Roche was first written down in 1752.
Q 05The Rockies were raised during which mountain-building episode 55 to 80 million years ago?
Laramide orogeny
Just afterwards the range was a Tibet-like plateau perhaps 6,000 m high; erosion has since stripped it down.
Q 06Which oceanic plate dived at an unusually shallow angle beneath North America, pushing mountain-building inland?
Farallon
Normally the effects reach 300 to 500 km inland; the Rockies rose much farther from the coast.
Q 07Which range, distinct from the Rockies, lies farther west and is tectonically younger?
The Sierra Nevada
The Cascade Range is the other younger western range; both lie beyond the Great Basin and Columbia Plateau.
Q 08What is the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies?
Mount Robson
It rises to 3,954 m and is the most prominent mountain in the whole range.
Q 09Which guide led the first documented ascent of the Canadian Rockies' highest peak in 1913?
Conrad Kain
The Secwepemc name for the mountain means striped rock.
Q 10After whom was the Rockies' highest peak named?
A Colorado territorial governor
Samuel Hitt Elbert brokered an 1873 treaty with the Ute that opened three million acres to miners, who named the peak for him.
Q 11Which peak, slightly taller than the Rockies' highest, is the highest in the contiguous United States?
Mount Whitney
Elbert's easy walk-up routes have earned it the nickname the gentle giant.
Q 12What is a 'fourteener' in western US mountaineering slang?
A peak of at least 14,000 feet
Many peak-baggers try to climb every one in a state or region.
Q 13Which Colorado mountain inspired Katharine Lee Bates to write America the Beautiful in 1893?
Pikes Peak
It is the easternmost fourteener in the US and hosts a hill-climb motor race run since 1916.
Q 21The Tetons are the youngest range in the Rockies. What process lifted them?
Stretching crust moving on the Teton fault
Grand Teton tops out at 13,775 feet.
Q 22Which huge valley forms the western edge of the Canadian Rockies and serves pilots as a visual highway?
The Rocky Mountain Trench
It runs about 1,600 km from Flathead Lake, Montana, to the Liard River near the Yukon border.
Q 23The great fault trough on the west side of the Canadian Rockies is also known by what nickname?
Valley of a Thousand Peaks
Q 14Zebulon Pike, who failed to climb his namesake peak in 1806, had been sent west by which president?
Thomas Jefferson
The first documented ascent was by botanist Edwin James in 1820.
Q 15What kind of railway climbs to the summit of the peak that inspired America the Beautiful?
A cog railroad
The Manitou and Pike's Peak Railway is the world's highest of its type; it reopened in 2021 after three years of repairs.
Q 16Longs Peak, the northernmost fourteener in the Rockies, is named after which explorer?
Stephen Long
Its sheer 1,000-foot East Face cliff is known as The Diamond.
Q 17Whose surveying party made the first recorded ascent of Longs Peak in 1868?
John Wesley Powell
Addie Alexander became the first woman to summit it three years later.
Q 18The Continental Divide runs along the Rockies, separating rivers flowing to which two oceans?
Pacific and Atlantic
Farther north, Alberta's Athabasca River drains via the Mackenzie to the Arctic instead.
Q 19Water from Glacier's Triple Divide Peak can reach the Atlantic, the Pacific and which third body of water?
Hudson Bay
That hydrological apex is why Waterton-Glacier is called the Crown of the Continent.
Q 20Which mountain range on the Utah-Wyoming border is one of the Rockies' central ranges?
The Uintas
Its neighbours in the central group include the Tetons and Utah's La Sal, Abajo and Henry mountains.
It is primarily a product of faulting, though glaciers carved parts of it into U-shaped valleys.
Q 24Which Colorado mountains hold the Rockies' highest peak and neighbouring Mount Massive?
Sawatch Range
Mount Massive is the second-highest peak in the Rockies.
Q 25Where does the tree line sit at the far northern end of the Rockies near the Yukon?
About 760 m
In New Mexico the same alpine tundra boundary is up at 3,700 m.
Q 26Where are North America's largest herds of elk found?
The Alberta-BC foothill forests
Wolves, grizzlies, moose, bighorn sheep and wolverines share the range with them.
Q 27How much can a pair of bighorn sheep horns weigh?
Up to 14 kg
The sheep themselves typically weigh up to 143 kg; their ancestors crossed the Bering land bridge from Siberia.
Q 28Guinness lists an 1875 Rocky Mountain locust swarm of 198,000 square miles as what?
The greatest concentration of animals ever
It was thought to hold 12.5 trillion insects, yet the species was extinct within 30 years.
Q 29In what year was the last Rocky Mountain locust specimen collected, in Colorado?
1904
The IUCN formally declared the species extinct in 2014.
Q 30The Spanish founded which city, the oldest continuous seat of government in the US, in 1610?
Santa Fe
Coronado had marched into the Rocky Mountain region from the south seventy years earlier.