From the eastern plains westward through the highest Rockies, Colorado's terrain is diverse, fascinating, and spectacularly beautiful. The highest state in the Union, with an average elevation of 6,800 feet and with 53 peaks above 14,000 feet, Colorado attracts sports enthusiasts and vacationers as well as high-technology research and business.

When gold was discovered near present-day Denver in 1858, an avalanche of settlers poured into the state; when silver was discovered soon afterward, a new flood came. Mining camps, usually crude tent cities clinging to the rugged slopes of the Rockies, contributed to Colorado's colorful, robust history. Some of these mines still operate, but most of the early mining camps are ghost towns today. Thousands of newcomers arrive yearly, drawn to Colorado's Rockies by the skiing, hunting, fishing, and magnificent scenery.

Throughout the state there are deep gorges, rainbow-colored canyons, mysterious mesas, and other strange and beautiful landmass variations carved by ancient glaciers and eons of erosion by wind, rain, and water. Great mountains of shifting sand lie trapped by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Great Sand Dunes National Monument (see also); fossils 140 million years old lie in the quarries of Dinosaur National Monument (see also).

Colorado produces more tin, molybdenum, uranium, granite, sandstone, and basalt than any other state. The mountain area also ranks high in production of coal, gold, and silver; the state as a whole has vast deposits of brick clay and oil. Its extensively irrigated plateaus and plains are good grazing lands for stock and rich producers of potatoes, wheat, corn, sugar beets, cauliflower, fruit, and flowers.

Spaniards penetrated the area by the mid-1500s. American exploration of the area first took place in 1806, three years after a good portion of the region became American property through the Louisiana Purchase. The leader of the party was Lieutenant Zebulon M. Pike, for whom Pikes Peak is named. Pike pronounced the 14,110-foot mountain unclimbable. Today, one may drive to the top on a good gravel highway (first 5 miles paved). Colorado became a territory in 1861 and earned its "Centennial State" nickname by becoming a state in 1876, 100 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.