"Rocky Mountain High" is a song written by John Denver and Mike Taylor and is one of the two official state songs of the U.S state of Colorado. Recorded by Denver in 1972, it is the title track of the 1972 album Rocky Mountain High, and rose to No. 9 on the US Hot 100 in 1973. Denver told concert audiences in the mid-1970s that the song took him an unusually long nine months to write. On April 10, 2017, the record was certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales exceeding 500,000 digital downloads.