As a boy, Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father's evocative stories about traveling across America as a young man, when he learned to understand the country from a ground-level perspective. In Earning the Rockies, Kaplan undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an understanding of American geography that is often lost in the jet age. In his clear-eyed and moving meditations on the American landscape, Kaplan shows how we must understand our geography in order to confront the challenging, anarchic world that Kaplan describes