Red Lodge

Red Lodge is a small town organized entirely around one enormous fact: the Beartooth Highway starts, or ends, right at its edge. Charles Kuralt once called it the most beautiful drive in America, and Lia and I arrived skeptical of that kind of claim, the way you should be about any superlative slapped on a road sign. By the time we’d driven it the next day, we’d stopped arguing.

Broadway Avenue and coal-camp roots

Red Lodge’s main street, Broadway Avenue, is lined with sturdy brick buildings put up by the immigrant coal miners who founded the town in the 1880s — Finns, Scots, Italians, and Slovenians who worked the seams beneath the Beartooth foothills and left behind a town still proud enough of its ethnic neighborhoods to run an annual festival celebrating each one. We wandered in and out of outfitters and a bakery advertising huckleberry everything, ordered a slice of huckleberry pie that more than lived up to the sign, and watched a mule deer amble down a side street like it paid rent there.

Climbing the Beartooth Highway

We left before sunrise to drive the Beartooth Highway itself, a 68-mile route that switchbacks out of Red Lodge and climbs almost 5,000 feet in elevation to Beartooth Pass at nearly 11,000 feet, above the treeline and into a landscape of alpine tundra, glacial lakes, and snowfields that linger into August. Lia white-knuckled a few of the hairpin turns while I kept slowing down for the views — the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness spreading out in every direction, marmots whistling from the rocks at the overlooks. The road eventually drops into Yellowstone’s northeast entrance, but even turning around partway makes for one of the great short drives in the country.

Rock Creek and slower afternoons

Back at lower elevation, Rock Creek runs right through Red Lodge, and on our second afternoon we swapped mountain driving for fly fishing, wading into water cold enough to ache within minutes. Lia caught nothing; I caught one small cutthroat trout we released without much ceremony. Afterward we sat on the creek bank until the evening chill pushed us back toward town, the Beartooth peaks going pink above the rooftops.

Getting There

The nearest airport is Billings Logan International, about an hour and forty minutes northeast by car, with connections to most major hubs. Red Lodge sits at the junction of US-212 and the Beartooth Highway, roughly an hour south of Billings and, when the pass is open (typically late May through mid-October), a spectacular alternate route into Yellowstone’s northeast entrance. Snow closes the Beartooth Highway most of the year above the pass, so anyone planning the drive should check conditions before setting out.