Chief Joseph Highway: The Escape Route East

Southeast of Cooke City, about thirteen miles along the Beartooth Highway, a turnoff leads over Dead Indian Pass and down into Sunlight Basin along what is now designated the Chief Joseph Scenic Highway, a length of Wyoming Highway Two Ninety-Six that commemorates one of the most significant chapters in the history of the Nez Perce people and their flight of eighteen seventy-seven.

In September of eighteen seventy-seven, the Nez Perce band that had fled United States Army forces across Idaho and through Yellowstone emerged from the park's northeast corner and moved rapidly north through the Clark's Fork drainage toward Canada. Their route passed through the canyon of the Clark's Fork of the Yellowstone River, a deeply cut gorge that proved difficult for the pursuing Army to follow. The Nez Perce used this terrain advantage to create enough distance to keep moving, though the Army eventually caught up with them at Bear Paw Mountain in north-central Montana, forty miles short of the Canadian border.

The Chief Joseph Scenic Highway follows a portion of this historic route through Sunlight Basin and the Clark's Fork drainage, connecting the Beartooth region to Cody, Wyoming, to the east. The highway provides access to Sunlight Basin, a broad valley of meadows and ranches that is one of the least visited significant landscapes in the greater Yellowstone region. The Clark's Fork of the Yellowstone, which runs through the canyon east of Cooke City, has a twenty-mile stretch designated a Wild and Scenic River, one of a relatively small number of river reaches in the United States to have received that protection. The highway and the river together make a strong case for this corner of Wyoming as a destination in its own right.