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After Armstrong's departure from the band in late 1925, his music still represented a musical and social challenge in that his style presented an exciting but perhaps threatening foil to the Paul Whiteman sound. Henderson, with Redman's arrangements, continued to negotiate between the two approaches, reflecting the intersection of the New Orleans and New York traditions. This can be heard in the band's revival of earlier jazz hits such as “Clarinet Marmalade” and “Wang Wang Blues”, and in Henderson's original blues compositions that represented a New York stylization of the raw, earthy southern style. Songs like “‘D’ Natural Blues”, “The Stampede”, “Rocky Mountain Blues”, and “Whiteman's Stomp” exemplify how Henderson's band tailored its music for widely contrasting purposes and continued to absorb Armstrong's legacy.

This chapter describes the responses of trees to elevational gradients and the characteristics of plants (and one or two animals) that must cope with cold climates on the tops of mountains. The higher the mountain, the stronger the environmental differences across the elevational gradient, and the more severe the challenges of life on top. These descriptions focus particularly on what one can see in the Rocky Mountains of the western states and the northeastern mountains of New York and New England.

Improved sampling designs are needed to detect, monitor, and predict plant migrations and plant diversity changes caused by climate change and other human activities. This chapter provides a methodology based on multi-scale vegetation plots established across forest ecotones to monitor changing patterns of plant diversity, invasion of non-native plant species, and plant migrations at landscape scales. The methods are applied in the forests of Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado.

This chapter details events in Josephine Roche's life from 1929 to 1932. As Roche and the miners at Rocky Mountain Fuel (RMF) implemented their “industrial Magna Carta,” they faced two major threats. One was the Great Depression. The other was the determination of Roche's competitors to drive her out of business because of her labor policy. When Roche took over RMF, the United States and most of the industrialized world were on the brink of the most profound economic downturn of the twentieth century. That global economic contraction made Roche's competitors the more eager to force her out of the coalfields and made it harder for her to maintain high labor standards. Remarkably, she held on, heralded by progressives as a “prophet of a new and wiser social order.” In the process, she established her place within an emerging political elite that would soon dominate national politics and government. Indeed, her work at RMF was one of many threads tying the Progressive Era to the New Deal.

This chapter details events in Josephine Roche's life from 1927–1928. Orphaned and unemployed in 1927, Roche contemplated her future. Her father's lawyers advised her to sell her stock in the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company and live off the proceeds. She could then follow the conventions of Denver's elite and devote herself to afternoon bridge or fulfill her sense of social responsibility by funding progressive causes. Neither option appealed. In fact, in this midlife moment of decision, Roche defied every sort of convention. In a blazing exhibition of nerve, she amassed enough shares to become the majority stockholder of her father's coal company, kicked out the sitting management, and transformed the mining operation into a progressive enterprise that welcomed organized labor back to the coalfields of Colorado.

This chapter discusses Yellowstone's cultural landscape and the people that inhabited the area throughout the historic era. Yellowstone was a landscape that had been shaped by thousands of years of human use and habitation. While small bands of hunters and gatherers made the longest and most persistent use of Yellowstone, larger outlying groups from eastern and western slopes of the Rocky Mountains also exploited the area on a seasonal basis. It also attracted people from distant locales, and indigenous groups traded with the complex horticultural societies that flourished in the Mississippi and upper Rio Grand valleys more than five centuries ago.

This chapter studies Sylvester Stallone's first seven films as director. These include: Paradise Alley (1978), Rocky II (1979), Rocky III (1982), Staying Alive (1983), Rocky IV (1985), Rocky Balboa (2006), and Rambo (2008). Stallone's accomplishments with Rocky and Rambo are considerable. He has made significant progress in recovering his stardom by resuscitating his signature roles and in forging an authorial identity. He has also demonstrated a mastery of contemporary Hollywood aesthetics, while extending the strategies of his earlier films, particularly with regard to editing. In this, he continues to offer a distinct variation on prevailing trends. In Paradise Alley, this meant overt colour symbolism alongside a self-conscious mobilisation of classical Hollywood conventions in relation to 1970s genre revisionism. Rocky II, III, and IV saw him develop a form of melodramatic storytelling that is nonetheless classicist, inflected with elements of the backstage musical seen most explicitly in Staying Alive.

This chapter examines Sylvester Stallone's Rocky franchise, underlining how all six films are underpinned by the title character's quest for recognition, validation, and self. The series often surrounds Rocky with symbolic representations as shaming devices. In Rocky, the triumphant training sequence is quickly followed by his soulful, even mournful, assessment of his chances and his station. Stallone similarly exploits the disconnection between Rocky and his image in Rocky II. Throughout the series, Stallone martyrs Rocky not only in battle, but also in his preparations for it. Images of training satisfy the expository need to show Rocky building his muscles. Moreover, they suggest that he is preparing his heart, purifying himself through pain. Indeed, Rocky IV concludes by embodying martyrdom and the messianic — two of the franchise's other thematic mainstays, and lenses through which Stallone continually views and magnifies Rocky's self.

I have something to show you. I just got it by overnight delivery.” My student’s face was a blaze of eagerness. From his backpack, he pulled out a small box. Seconds later, magically cupped in his hands was a tiny, neon lime green frog with black eyes. This was hardly the fare for a usual student–teacher appointment. But Blake Klocke is no ordinary university student, though he appears so—the same blue jeans and backpack uniform, laptop at the ready. The difference is not his red hair and freckles, but his amphibian excitement. On his laptop, he displayed for me dozens of frog-related book-marked websites, which he explained aglow with enthusiasm. He had been raising frogs since he was nine, being part of a rescue train across the world of hobbyists who have been keeping the genetic strains of frogs alive in their homes as they are being extinguished in the wilds. Zoos don’t have the space or the avid visiting publics to care about these small, diverse members of the living community, so without the care of personal frog lovers like Blake in raising captive-bred endangered amphibians, our world would have lost these strands of life’s web. The black-eyed tree frog is a critically endangered Central American species that is decreasing so rapidly that scientists predict it will be reduced by 80% in the wild in ten years by the life-sucking, zombie-like Chytrid fungus that is wiping out full populations. “Once my frogs have young, I can get you some so you can raise your own,” Blake offered, ready to convert me to the simple joys of amphibian care. Blake has experienced this excitement from his youth on, and his outdoors adventures have created a love in him that will carry him far— far beyond the lakes and wetlands near Eagan, Minnesota, where he first started catching tadpoles. This finding the “drama in the bush” is just what Leopold had been advocating in his classes, radio talks to young farmers, and writings about the sport of amateur naturalist studies.

Within the area around Las Cruces, New Mexico, is a network of studies both at the Jornada Experimental Range (JER) and the Chihuahuan Desert Rangeland Research Center (CDRRC), which includes the Desert Soil-Geomorphology Project. All of these research entities are in the Chihuahuan Desert; this chapter describes the geologic history and development of landscapes that are important elements to our understanding of this ecosystem and its dynamic nature. Southern New Mexico consists of C3 shrubs and C4 grasses in the lower elevations surrounded by C3 woodlands and juniper savannas in the higher elevations (Dick-Peddie 1993; see also chapter 10). Although the boundary of the Chihuahuan Desert has differed slightly depending on whether it was based on vegetative or climatic criteria, the boundary most widely used is based on a de Martonne aridity index of 10 (Schmidt 1979). Like many deserts of the world, the Chihuahuan Desert is in a zone of dry, high-pressure cells near 30° latitude; is relatively far from marine moisture sources; and occupies a position in which mountains scavenge moisture from weather fronts (Strahler and Strahler 1987). The orographic influence is especially important in Mexico, which contains about threefourths of the Chihuahuan Desert, because the desert is bounded to the west by the Sierra Madre Occidental and to the east by the Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains. The basin and range province consists of north–south trending mountain ranges and broad intervening desert basins that at the Jornada Basin site is the product of the Rio Grande rift tectonic system, which has been active since middle tertiary time (Seager 1975; Seager et al. 1984). Erosion of the steeply tilted mountain ranges has been the main source of sediment for the filling of the intermontane basins. Vertically, sedimentary deposits are separated by paleosols that indicate quiescent times following periods of erosion and sedimentation. As the basins filled with sediment, pore spaces between sediment particles filled with water from rain, making these structural basins large reservoirs of ground water (Hawley and Lozinsky 1992; Hawley and Kennedy 2004).

This introductory chapter provides a background of Sylvester Stallone's work as writer, director, and actor, and catalogues his global impact and iconicity. Brought to international attention in 1976 with Rocky, Stallone became a top star in the 1980s as a result of Rocky III (1982), Rocky IV (1985), and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985). During that decade, as screenwriter and performer, he helped launch a new kind of ‘hard body’ action hero and re-established traditional values, promoting a rugged, macho individualism that was nevertheless in tune with the times' emphasis on fitness and vigilante defence. Most of his films have provided comfort, cult, and camp entertainment to audiences in theatres, on TV, VHS, DVD, and online due to Stallone-the-star's iconic appeal. Indeed, thirty-five years after his start in film, Stallone's influence remains so great that whether onscreen or behind the scenes, he functions as an ‘auteur’.

This chapter describes the archaeology of the Great Plains. It focuses on the physiographic regions of the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, Great Basin, Colorado Plateau, and Columbia Plateau which yielded information pertinent to prehistoric hunting. These physiographic features provide very different and rapidly changing vegetative cover critical to animal ecology. This chapter explains that the records of the livestock industry over more than a century suggest that prehistoric human survival must have been tested on many occasions.

This chapter examines the hunting of mountain sheep in the Rocky Mountains during the prehistoric period. It explains that mountain sheep demonstrate behavioral patterns quite different from those of deer or pronghorn, and hunting strategies that are successful with sheep will not necessarily be effective for other animals. It mentions that a constant threat to mountain sheep populations is their inability to adapt successfully to the presence of humans and to build up immunity to parasites and diseases introduced by domestic sheep.

This chapter investigates the hunting of deer, elk, and other creatures in Rocky Mountains during the prehistoric period. It describes the remains of mule deer and Rocky Mountain elk in archaeological remains and discusses the behavioral patterns of other animals including small mammals, birds, and black and grizzly bears. It also explains the hunting strategies for these animals.

This chapter describes tools and weaponry used by the prehistoric hunter. The weaponry used for more than 11,000 years of hunting on the plains, in the Rocky Mountains and in parts of adjacent areas varies to some extent but still conforms to a single design and purpose: a stone, metal, bone or antler projectile with a sharp tip is propelled with enough force to penetrate and deliver a mortal wound. This chapter suggests that whatever the hunter's choice of weapon care and regular practice in its use are critically important determinants of hunting success because the delivery by the hunter of a projectile to produce a lethal wound is a final and crucial act in a hunting episode.

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on prehistoric hunting in the North American Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. The plains and mountains together truly provided a home for the large mammals and their prehistoric human predators, but many differences in archaeological materials recovered from the plains and those found in the mountains remain unexplained and are waiting to be resolved. This chapter also suggests that there is a delicate balance between preservation and loss of evidence of prehistoric human hunting.

This chapter examines the issue of ageing in relation to the revival of the characters of Rocky in Rocky Balboa (2006) and John Rambo in Rambo (2008). Action cinema has long been coupled with the staging of seemingly impossible or improbable stunts and forms of spectacle, an important factor of which is the built male body. In this context, successfully reviving both the Rocky and Rambo characters has involved the management of ideas about ageing. In Rocky Balboa, Stallone offers a nuanced nostalgia, acknowledging the physical changes and personal loss of ageing alongside a celebration of the defining determination of the iconic boxer. Rambo serves as the inverse or counterpoint to that more reflective mode, a re-presentation as much as a re-working of one of the two film heroes that have defined Stallone's career. Rocky Balboa is explicitly a film about ageing and loss, while in Rambo, Stallone's age is barely alluded to.

In the sprawling, climate-controlled, glass- and steel-ribbed tent of Biosphere II, Dave Breshears is killing trees. Together with Henry Adams, his graduate student accomplice, he arranged to have piñon pines dug up and hauled in from northern New Mexico. Next he saw to their replanting and watering, got them rooted, growing, and happy, and then—for some, but not for all—shut off the water. Breshears wants to find out what makes them die. Biosphere II is an unlikely setting for controlled experiments in tree murder—or for anything else. Rising from the Arizona desert like the main terminal of a misplaced airport, its design sexy and futuristic, it is full of the pride of technology and the promise of discovery. In its integration of multiple volumetric forms and vast banks of windows, it might be the architectural love child of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum and a backyard greenhouse. A scanty procession of tourists detours from the beaten path to pay twenty dollars a head to enter the structure, which was meant to be an indoor replication of everything outdoors. It is a proto–space station: Biosphere II was conceived as a living and breathing microcosm of Biosphere I, the planet Earth. Bankrolled by the Texas oilman and investor Edward P. Bass, the creators of Biosphere II hoped that it would serve as a laboratory where earthlings might learn to package (and eventually export) their bubble of life to distant planets and solar systems. Toward that end, in September 1991, with much fanfare and not a little criticism, eight so-called biospherians, four men and four women, were sealed inside the three-acre complex for a two-year stay. Socially and biologically, the expectations were utopian: they were to grow their own food, maintain a life-supporting atmosphere, and get along as a team. Functionally the results were quite different. After thirteen months, said one, “We were starving, suffocating and going quite mad.”