Summer in Cooke City: When the Road Opens

For the roughly five months when the Beartooth Highway is open and Cooke City is accessible from two directions, the town operates as a base camp for some of the most extraordinary outdoor recreation in the American West. Hikers, backpackers, anglers, mountain bikers, and climbers use Cooke City as a resupply point and departure location for the surrounding wilderness and high country.

The trails that begin at trailheads around Cooke City quickly gain elevation into the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, reaching alpine terrain within a few miles in most directions. The Beartooth Plateau above town contains hundreds of high-altitude lakes that hold native cutthroat trout and are accessible to anglers willing to carry their gear uphill. The streams coming off the plateau, including Soda Butte Creek, which runs through town, hold fish and flow through a landscape shaped by glaciers in ways visible everywhere in the rounded peaks and U-shaped valleys.

The town has always been small enough that its visitor infrastructure, the handful of lodges, outfitters, and small stores, serves as a genuine supply stop rather than a tourist destination built around commercial distraction. Coming to Cooke City requires knowing what you are there for. The people who come in summer know it: they are there to get away from everywhere else. The Beartooth Plateau above town and the Lamar Valley inside the park below it offer two entirely different versions of what wild country looks like, and for a few months each year Cooke City sits between them as the only place to stop.