Baja CaliforniaSatellite image of Baja California, northwestern Mexico.(more)A belt of granite lies inland and forms a mountainous zone from the axis of (in ), through southern California, along the in the states of California and , northwestward into Idaho, and then north-northwestward along the western margin of the to Alaska. This granite belt underlay the volcanoes that marked the in Mesozoic and Early Cenozoic times. The intrusion of this granite was most intense between 170 million and 70 million years ago during the . The Sierra Nevada of California, which contains , the highest peak in the contiguous United States, is composed almost entirely of this granite.Mount RobsonMount Robson in the Canadian Rockies, British Columbia, Canada.(more)While subduction of oceanic lithosphere occurred beneath western North America, a major fold and thrust belt developed east of the granitic belt. During Mesozoic time, the Precambrian basement of Canada and North America was underthrust westward at least 200 km (125 miles) beneath the Andean margin, and the sedimentary rocks covering it were folded and thrust onto one another. Although present in the western United States, this fold and thrust belt is most clearly revealed in the Canadian Rockies along the border between the provinces of and , particularly in and national parks.In sum, throughout the latter half of the Mesozoic, from about 170 million to 66 million years ago, the topography of western North America probably resembled that of western South America: a trench lay offshore; a belt of volcanoes underlain by granitic intrusions marked the western edge of a high range of mountains; and a fold and thrust belt lay east of the range. The tectonic history of western North America is more complicated, however, because during this period fragments of both continents and suboceanic plateaus were carried to the subduction zone and collided with North America. Most of the rock now found in westernmost Canada and Alaska consists of separate terrains of rock that were independently accreted to North America and that were subsequently deformed when the next such terrain collided with it. Moreover, tectonic processes occurring during the Cenozoic (since 66 million years ago) have been different from those that occurred earlier and have severely modified the landscape.Wind River RangeWind River Range, west-central Wyoming, U.S.(more)Beginning about 70 million to 80 million years ago, the locus of crustal shortening in the United States shifted from the fold and thrust belt, whose remnants now lie along the borders of western Utah and eastern Nevada and of western Wyoming and eastern Idaho, to eastern Utah, Colorado, and central Wyoming. Between about 70 million and 40 million years ago, thrust faulting on the margins of the in , the and the in , and the in , among others, allowed the uplift of blocks of Precambrian rock that are now exposed in the cores of these ranges. Together, these intracontinental ranges of block-faulted mountains form most of the of the United States., The Canadian Rockies are the easternmost part of the Canadian Cordillera, the collective name for the mountains of Western Canada. They form part of the American Cordillera, an essentially continuous sequence of mountain ranges that runs all the way from Alaska to the very tip of South America., Western Cordillera, in western North America, a system of mountain ranges extending from the U.S. state of Alaska through northwestern Canada, the western United States, and into Mexico. The largest range is the Canadian Rockies; others include the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, and the Coast Ranges. The continent’s .