Book excerpt: The book¿s 21 chapters, or vignettes, lead you to easily accessible stops along the Front Range¿s highways and byways, where you¿ll meet the apatosaur and other dinosaurs who roamed the floodplains and beaches that once covered the Front Range; look for diamonds in rare, out-of-the-way volcanic pipes; learn how America¿s mountain, Pikes Peak, developed from molten magma miles below the surface only to become an important visual landmark for early Great Plains¿ travelers; and walk the Gangplank, a singularly important plateau for both nineteenth-century westward expansion and our understanding of the Front Range¿s most recent exhumation.