There once was a fluffy little squeaky-toy of a species, the American pika, that was also a four-season alpinist. There are pikas that live their whole lives looking down on Everest Base Camp, and there are pikas that live in the desert heat of Lava Beds National Monument. So, which is it? Is the pika a hapless poster child for climate disaster, even though it manages to survive in some of the harshest landscapes on the planet? This talk will show the pika from many angles (and mostly in pictures rather than graphs), to celebrate the diversity and perfection of one of the many species that might soon become too rare to really study.