The Beartooth Highway: Charles Kuralt Was Right
Near Cooke City, Wyoming
Charles Kuralt, the CBS correspondent who spent years driving the American road for his On the Road segments, called the Beartooth Highway the most beautiful drive in America. The road climbs from Red Lodge, Montana, at five thousand five hundred sixty feet, to Beartooth Pass at ten thousand nine hundred forty-seven feet, then descends into Cooke City and the northeastern gate of Yellowstone. The total distance is sixty-eight miles. The ascent involves switchbacks that gain several thousand feet in a few horizontal miles, crossing a plateau where the road passes through alpine tundra above tree line for roughly twenty-two miles before beginning its descent.
The highway was pushed through by Representative Scott Leavitt of Montana with the assistance of Park Service director Horace Albright and completed in nineteen thirty-six as a New Deal public works project. The engineering required significant blasting of the Beartooth Plateau, a high-elevation surface of Precambrian granite that had been scoured by ice sheets during the Pleistocene and left with few natural grades that a road could follow without dynamite.
The road passes through the Custer Gallatin National Forest on the Montana side and the Shoshone National Forest on the Wyoming side. It closes each October when the first serious snow falls and reopens each May, sometimes later, when the snowplows finish clearing drifts that can reach thirty feet at the summit cuts.
The tundra plants on the plateau above tree line include species adapted to a growing season of roughly ten weeks. Their root systems are older than most of the trees visible lower on the mountain.
