The Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness

Surrounding Cooke City on three sides is a designated wilderness area that is among the largest in the lower forty-eight states. The Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness covers nearly a million acres of the Custer and Gallatin National Forests, an expanse of alpine terrain, volcanic peaks, and deep drainages that forms the northern and eastern edge of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

The wilderness was designated by Congress in nineteen seventy-eight, providing federal protection to a landscape that had remained roadless largely because its terrain defied road building at any reasonable cost. The Beartooth Plateau, the high-altitude surface above Cooke City, contains hundreds of lakes, high trails above ten thousand feet, and peaks that rise above twelve thousand feet in a range that was carved by glaciers during the last ice age and still shows their work everywhere you look.

Grizzly bears, gray wolves, mountain goats, and bighorn sheep live in the Absaroka-Beartooth. The wilderness is also one of the most important watersheds in the region. The streams that drain it feed the Clark's Fork of the Yellowstone to the east and the tributaries of the Yellowstone River to the west, eventually contributing water to the Missouri River system and ultimately to the Gulf of Mexico.

Cooke City sits at the junction of several trail systems that access the wilderness interior, and for backpackers and wilderness travelers it functions as a supply point and trailhead town in summer the same way it functions as a snowmobile hub in winter. The wilderness is the reason the town exists in the size it does.