Arriving via the Beartooth: The Road Down From Everywhere
Near Cooke City, Montana
The Beartooth Highway, United States Highway Two Twelve between Red Lodge and Cooke City, climbs from the valley floor at Red Lodge to the summit of Beartooth Pass at ten thousand nine hundred forty-seven feet above sea level in about twelve miles, gaining roughly five thousand seven hundred feet of elevation through a series of switchbacks and exposed ridgeline sections that, depending on your comfort with heights and hairpin turns, are either thrilling or terrifying. CBS News correspondent Charles Kuralt, who spent his career driving American back roads, called it the most beautiful drive in America.
From the summit of Beartooth Pass, the descent toward Cooke City traverses the Beartooth Plateau, a high-altitude landscape of tundra, scattered lakes, and snowfields that can hold lingering patches of white even in July and August. The vegetation is spare. The sky is very large. The scale communicates clearly that you are at a great altitude in a range that does not accommodate human requirements with any warmth.
Cooke City appears at the bottom of the final descent as a collection of low buildings tucked into a narrow valley between the two mountain ranges. The arrival has a quality of relief that is partly geographical. You have come down from the exposed heights of the plateau into something that qualifies, relatively speaking, as shelter. The highway's main stretch is maintained by the National Park Service rather than the state of Wyoming, an unusual arrangement for a road that is open only about five months per year and requires extraordinary effort to keep passable even within that season.
