Beartooth Highway

The Beartooth Highway is the scenic route from Red Lodge, MT to the Northeast Entrance by Cooke City, MT.  It opened at noon on Memorial Day and by 1 pm, Clarise and I were on our way to driving up the craziest road either of us had ever been on. Before leaving the park however, we ran into an all too common traffic jam which sometimes results in just another bison or elk sighting but this time we got the much harder to find big horn sheep. A whole flock of them!



It is about 2 hours one way if you drive straight through but we did not get to Red  Lodge for 5 hours due to frequent stops and even an impromptu waterfall hike in Custer National Forest.  Clarise said it her favorite thing we have seen or done in our time here so far.





The first hour we were amazed by the rugged, snowy peaks before us and when we stopped at a scenic overlook we read that they were not even the Beartooth Mountains yet!  They were an eastern extension of the Absaroka Mountains that paralleled the highway into the North Entrance on our first day.



After climbing a ridiculously windy road with snow pack over twice the height of my car on either side, we came over a ridge and found ourselves in the Beartooth Mountains.  The Beartooth Mountains are really great and our crowned and named after a distinctive mountain peak that is shaped like a bear tooth.



We descended into Red Lodge where we shared some Chinese food but found we were still hungry and on our way out of town we saw a parked tour bus with an open sign in the window.  It was a Mexican restaurant on wheels and we just had to stop by and see what it was all about.



Of all places to have the most delicious, authentic Mexican tacos of my life, who would have thought it would be on a bus in Montana?  We drove back the way we came, passing a bicyclist halfway through with only half an hour of daylight left.  I wonder what happened to him?  We got back home in the dark and found out the next day from co workers that they closed it back up that night when a blizzard hit the area and erased the road crews hard work.  Talk about good timing.  Even though it is named the Beartooth Highway I was more impressed by the Absaroka Mountains than the Beartooth as the Beartooth Mountains did not encompass a very big area while the Absaroka Mountains seem to keep popping back up everywhere.

Pictures of the winding road and some snow graffiti