Includes bibliographical references and index.

Colorado diamonds? It's no hoax! -- Diamond pipes along the front range -- Walking the gangplank -- Soapstone Prairie Natural Area -- Nature's master sculptor -- Trail Ridge Road -- Catastrophe in the canyon -- The devastating Big Thompson Flood -- Deja vu all over again -- Mountains come, mountains go at Eldorado Canyon State Park -- From pediments to plutonium -- The history of Rocky Flats -- Where Colorado began -- The Colorado mineral belt at Idaho Springs -- Raising, razing, and rebirthing the rockies -- Tracing the mountains' ups and downs around Golden -- The whole shebang -- Red Rocks to Golden : 1,700 million years of front range history -- Denver's Dinosaur Freeway -- Dinosaur Ridge -- A legacy of fire and flood -- The wall mountain tuff and the castle rock conglomerate -- An extraordinary fossil ecosystem -- Florissant fossil beds national monument -- Colorado's mountain of gold -- Cripple Creek -- Purple Mountain majesty -- Pikes Peak, America's mountain -- Spelunking in an ancient sea -- Cave of the winds -- Building a garden fit for the gods -- Faulting and fins at Garden of the Gods and nearby parks -- Hallmarks of a hothouse world -- Paint Mines Interpretive Park -- A wound in the skin of the Earth -- Royal Gorge -- Jurassic Park -- Dinosaurs of the Cañon City Area -- Legendary dikes -- The Spanish Peaks -- The day the dinosaurs died -- The infamous K-T boundary at Trinidad Lake State Park.