This southwest-looking, low-oblique photograph shows the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains and Denver, the capital of Colorado. Denver became an important and prosperous trading center and city during the rich gold and silver strikes of the late 1870s and 1880s. With a metropolitan population of 1.8 million, Denver is a financial processing center; shipping and distributing point for an extensive agricultural area; headquarters for numerous gold, silver, and coal mining operations and sugar beet industries. Denver has stockyards and meat-packing plants; publishing houses; railroad shops; fruit and vegetable canneries; feed and flour mills; many electronics plants; and manufacturing facilities for mining machinery, aerospace, scientific apparatus, rubber goods, and luggage. Tourism is also important, especially during the long skiing season. Northeast of the central city, the runways of the new Denver International Airport are visible; just southwest of the new airport toward the central city, the runways of the old Stapleton Airport can be seen. West of the city (near the southwest edge of the photograph) 14 260-foot (4349-meter) snow-covered Mount Evans stands out dramatically. At the summit of Mount Evans is the world-famous International University Cosmic Ray Laboratory (not visible in the photograph).