Red Lodge Mountain: The Ski Area That Answered the Coal
Near Red Lodge, Montana
Red Lodge Mountain opened for skiing on January second, nineteen sixty, with one double chairlift, three trails, and a small lodge. That first chairlift served a terrain called Grizzly Peak, and the mountain has gone by that name informally since its opening season. The timing was not accidental. Red Lodge had just watched the coal era end. The Beartooth Highway had been open for twenty-four years and was bringing summer visitors. The question was how to build a year-round economy that did not depend on a single seasonal road.
Skiing gave Red Lodge a winter product. The Beartooth Mountains behind town rise steeply and receive substantial snowfall, and the terrain above the town offered the kind of vertical drop, roughly two thousand four hundred feet, that justifies building chairlifts. The mountain developed over the following decades, adding lifts and trails as the ski industry grew nationally and as Red Lodge positioned itself as a more affordable alternative to the better-known destinations of Colorado and Utah.
Nearby, the Beartooth Basin Summer Ski Area sits on the plateau above the highway, a separate operation established in nineteen sixty-two on a roughly six-hundred-acre snowfield reaching about ten thousand nine hundred feet, where ski racers train in summer without traveling overseas. The combination of a winter ski resort and a summer ski camp gave Red Lodge a year-round mountain economy that the coal industry never could have provided.
