COOKE CITY, Mont. — To drive on the Beartooth Highway is to dance on top of the world. The mountainous landscape possesses thrilling, take-your-breath-away beauty.
We expect our time on the Beartooth Highway to be spectacular. It is a high performer on those exclamation-point lists of greatest roads in America. The serpentine roadway is lauded as "The Highway to the Sky" and "A Drive Along the Roof of the Rockies."
The Beartooth Highway begins and ends in Montana but makes a generous dip into Wyoming. It winds through Custer, Gallatin and Shoshone national forests, one of the most rugged and largest wilderness areas in the United States.
By tradition, the Beartooth Highway opens the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. The driving season lasts until Oct. 15. About 1,250 cars per day use the high-elevation route, according to the Montana Department of Transportation. The famed scenic drive is a 69-mile section of U.S. Highway 212.
Snowplows remain on standby when we drive the switchbacks over Montana's tallest mountains on May 27. We begin in Cooke City, situated at Yellowstone National Park's northeastern entrance. This old gold-mining town awakens as soon as the highway opens because townspeople depend on tourists almost exclusively.
From the beginning, it is clear that this is no ordinary drive through the mountains. A sign begs for caution: "Open Range. Expect cows on road." We glimpse a herd of elk and stop for picture-taking at a sparkling stream fringed with delicate, colorful wildflowers. We enter a forest of spruce, fir and lodge-pole pine mixed with stands of aspen, and almost immediately feel a change in elevation. Long-range views of snow-mottled mountains, wide valleys and lapis-blue alpine lakes span the windshield.
Once the two-lane starts twisting into hairpin curves, we marveled at more than just the scenery. The road is an engineering triumph. Construction began in 1932 and required five years to complete. The highway traverses the meeting point of several of North America's major geologic and tectonic features. Granite peaks scratch the sky. Glacier-carved cirques empty into U-shaped valleys.
Our car climbs higher and higher to 10,947 feet above sea level. Isolated and surreal, the Beartooth Plateau hides under a light blanket of snow. Small ice-crusted lakes and rounded boulders punctuate the tundra. Animal tracks cross wide-open spaces. A young man catches the wind with his snow kite and it pulls him across a field near Little Bear Lake.
We reach Top of the World, a stopping point for food, fuel and lodging. Snow flurries sprinkle three cars in the parking lot. Within a few
miles, the uber-scenic highway turns into a playground. Downhill skiers pepper the white landscape. They plunge down ungroomed slopes in frenzied disarray. Once at the bottom, they hitchhike back to the top — a half-dozen at a time piled in the beds of pickup trucks — for another run. People with binoculars and scopes watch their friends tear down mountainsides. This weekend presents the season's first access, hence a festival atmosphere spills into parking areas.
The formidable Beartooth Mountains deliver a powerful heart-in-the-throat view — a sight not soon forgotten. We zero in on the Bear's Tooth. The Crow Indians named the narrow pyramidal spire. The jagged granite peaks are thought to be 2.7 billion years old.
A sign marking the 45th parallel includes a notation that we are halfway between the North Pole and the equator.
The 5,555-foot descent to Red Lodge is a string of superlatives. From Vista Point, we have expansive views of Rock Creek Canyon. A seven-mile stretch of switchbacks displays the peaks and glaciers of the Beartooth Mountains, the windswept tundra of Hellroaring and Silver Run plateaus and the cascading waters of Rock Creek. At the base of the Beartooth Mountains, we enter the historic mining town.