How would you describe the “sense of place” of the Southern Rocky Mountain Biordgion today?
I still describe my sense of place as having many of the same components it had when I first moved here. This is a place that has been used, but not as heavily as some parts of the world. In Europe, you have land use changes that go back to the Bronze Age! So there is still a sense of a natural landscape, where it is easy to get away from large numbers of people. There is a sense of openness that is partly a function of climate – the aridity and relatively sparse vegetation. Because of the lack of human alteration of the landscape relative to other parts of the world, there is still that sense of being close to natural processes. You can see evidence of geology – the mountain building or valley cutting of glaciers. To summarize, it’s still a very similar sense of place that I had when I moved here. It’s just tempered by that knowledge that it is not as apart from humans as I once thought it was. There is a longer and more intensive history of human interaction with the landscape than I
