Beartooth Highway

I left Red Lodge on a morning in late June when the clouds were still low over the Beartooth Mountains and the air smelled of pine resin and overnight rain. Within twenty minutes the town was invisible below me and the road had begun doing things that roads are not supposed to do — switchback after switchback cut into the cliff face, each one revealing a different altitude, a different vegetation zone, a different quality of light. By the time I reached the plateau at nearly 3,400 meters, I was above everything that normally constitutes a landscape. The world below had become abstract.

US Highway 212, which runs 112 kilometers between Red Lodge, Montana and Cooke City, Montana (near Yellowstone’s northeast entrance), is one of the highest paved roads in the United States. It was completed in 1936 as a New Deal public works project and climbs from 1,700 meters to 3,350 meters at Beartooth Pass in a series of switchbacks that would be preposterous if they weren’t also so obviously necessary. The views from the top — an alpine plateau of granite knobs, snowfields, and glacial tarns that extends in every direction — make preposterous feel like the exactly right register.

The plateau itself is not something most drivers stop to explore, which seems like an omission. I pulled over at Rock Creek Vista Point on the Montana side and walked thirty minutes across a landscape that belongs to a different altitude: alpine meadows only centimeters tall, ptarmigan moving through the low growth, marmots on every rock pile, and in the snowfields the algae that tints the snow pink and red — a phenomenon called watermelon snow that has a faint scent, if you get close enough, of actual melon. The tarns here are shallow and startlingly blue, fed by snowmelt and reflecting nothing but sky.

The drive from the plateau down the Wyoming side descends into the Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone River valley, where the landscape transitions back to pine forest and then to the sagebrush and meadows at the Yellowstone border. The town of Cooke City at the eastern entrance to the park has a population of around 140 people, a saloon serving genuinely good burgers, and a reputation for being snowed in for months at a time in winter — the highway closes from November through May most years, sealing the residents in until spring.

Red Lodge, at the Montana end of the highway, is worth more than a gas stop. It’s a small coal mining and ranching town — two industries that don’t typically coexist with the après-ski aesthetic that has taken over most of Montana’s resort towns — that has preserved something of its actual history while also hosting a genuinely decent independent bookshop and a bar that serves local craft beer from a tap list that would not shame a city. The Carbon County Historical Museum in the old train depot covers the coal mining history of the area, including the 1943 Smith Mine disaster in which 74 miners died — not the kind of history that draws visitors but the kind that tells you who actually built the town.

When to go: Late May through mid-October, but check current conditions before departure — the highway can close with little notice due to snow even in summer. July and August for guaranteed open road and snow still visible on the plateau. Early morning or late afternoon drives avoid the heaviest traffic and catch the best light on the granite faces.