The towering peaks of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains posed a daunting obstacle for 19th-century settlers pushing America’s expansion, establishing a legacy for later film and television portrayals as a locale where forbidding physical dangers are matched only by a lush wild (and often snowbound) beauty. It’s in the mountains around Durango and Silverton that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid rob a train, flee a pursuing posse through the rugged countryside, and ultimately take a dangerous plunge into the Animas River. The mountains are a more distant menace in Cliffhanger, where an airplane’s hijacking is filmed above the snow-capped Rockies, while close-up climbing shots are matched by the Italian Alps. Throughout the film, the wider shots continually emphasize man’s place in this terrain – that of tiny denizens who hold only a tenuous grip on life. But man has also tamed portions of the Rockies for other alpine diversions, like skiing. In Dumb and Dumber, two money-toting idiots sample the mild dangers offered by Aspen’s winter season, surviving a night in the cold, the effects of frost and a frigid ride on a tiny motorcycle. Another comic take on the Rockies sets them as an animated backdrop to the weekly mayhem taking place in South Park, and the film version opens with a song noting how “the snow’s pure and white on the earth rich and brown,” before tearing into the social failings of this “quiet, little, redneck, podunk, white-trash” mountain town. Season 12 sees the kids visit a pioneer-era living museum for a taste of 1864 Colorado populated by the likes of “Sheriff McLawdog” and “Murdering Murphy.” Creator, Trey Parker and his college friends had earlier utilized the snowy mountain vistas near their UC Boulder campus to tell the live-action, low-budget story of Colorado’s favorite cannibal in Alferd Packer: The Musical. Putting a lighter touch and a larger budget on Colorado’s covered wagon times was Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman. Though supposedly set in Colorado Springs, the Rockies are noticeably absent, since the program was filmed on a California ranch. Jeremiah Johnson, on the other hand, got a lot closer by filming Utah as a stand-in for the Rocky locales inhabited by the film’s mountain men. Here again, the Rockies prove a most dangerous locale, since grizzly bears are the deadliest catch for trappers looking to strike it rich in the bitter cold of Colorado’s high country. By the dawn of the 20th century, though, large-scale mining operations would harvest the rich veins of ore coursing within the Rockies themselves. The abandoned Colorado coal mining town of Calumet is doubled for by the more-vibrant Las Vegas, New Mexico in Red Dawn, where the mountains provide refuge for young American partisans fighting off a fictional Soviet invasion. The same Cold War-era anxiety which inspired that film, prompted the U.S. military to once and for all tame the Rockies by hollowing out Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs. Establishing shots in Stargate SG-1 portray the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station as the location of its secret military command center. The mountain also houses NORAD’s malfunctioning nuclear-armed supercomputer in Wargames, proving that a man-made Rocky Mountain is far more dangerous than nature’s version.