Beartooth Highway

What better way to celebrate our country's birthday than to visit its first National Park? The National Park idea and system is something that makes me very proud of my country! Today, we went on a drive through the northwestern part of Yellowstone and out over the Beartooth Highway, the longest stretch of alpine highway in the lower 48 which Charles Kurault called "America's most beautiful highway," through Red Lodge, Montana, and back through Livingston to our Yellowstone River campsite. What a fantastic day!

We crossed the Blacktail Plateau in Yellowstone, and the Petrified Tree near Roosevelt, and on through the Lamar Valley. There, we saw a huge herd of Bison, which was crossing the road, grazing alongside the road, rolling in the dirt, and generally enjoying life in the Park. We also saw Pronghorn, a little too far away to photograph. Click here to watch a little video from our pocket camera of the Bison.

Coming through the Lamar Valley, we enjoyed spectacular scenery, a few geysers like Soda Butte, lovely brilliant green meadows, and rugged mountains. The road exits the park through Cooke City, Wyoming, and continues on through more gorgeous scenery to climb toward Beartooth Pass. Pilot and Index Peaks were a spectacular sight near Cooke City, which you could also see from up on Beartooth Pass.

Once we left Yellowstone, we began the official Beartooth Highway Scenic Byway, and the scenery kept getting even better as we climbed higher and higher. We stopped at Beartooth Lake, at the top of one grade, which was spectacular. The lake comes up so suddenly we almost crashed the car in our awestruck surprise! Okay, I exaggerate, but it was quite beautiful and too sudden to get a photo of that first view from the road. We pulled into the campground by the lake, which was nice, got some photos of the lake from the boat launch area, and we saw a moose in a meadow. The views were very nice as we climbed, but there was so much more! According to the Scenic Byway website, "The Beartooth area is one of the highest and most rugged areas in the lower 48 states, with 20 peaks reaching over 12,000 feet in elevation. Glaciers grace the north flank of nearly every towering mountain peak." This statement is no exaggeration!

We began to see snowfields and the vegetation changed to tundra. Wildflowers were filling the alpine meadows and flowers I've only seen when I've climbed high mountain peaks were lining the road! Sky Pilots are a beautiful purplish blue flower that are unusual for tundra species because they grow taller than the usual mats and "belly flowers," and I always get excited to see even one or two of these alpine beauties, so you can imagine my delight to see them as roadside bouquets. Beautiful little glacial tarns - small lakes - dotted the hillsides along the road. And we kept going up!! We kept thinking it must be the pass, but no, the road seemed to go over the top of the mountain instead of a pass. What looked like a natural pass had vertical cliffs going down the other side for thousands of feet - oh, okay, so that's why the road keeps going up! It's amazing a road was built here at all, and for those who can't hike up to the alpine life zone, this road offers a rare opportunity to enjoy life at these great heights. It really made us excited to get to the Arctic Tundra we hoped to visit on our trip, in Yukon/NWT and Alaska!

Finally we got to the pass - there are two summits to the pass, and we went to the west summit. There were dark clouds threatening an afternoon thundershower and some early fireworks, but we enjoyed the view for quite a while. We met some guys on motorcycles who were just as excited about the tundra as we were, and who knew about the Dempster and Dalton Highways (one was from Canada) and told us how much we'd love them, and that in August it will be autumn on the tundra and is just like New England with lovely fall colors, only a foot tall! We can't wait.

After the pass, the road descended a winding steep grade into a steep, avalanche prone canyon with a viewpoint looking back up toward the pass and down the canyon. There was a campground at the bottom that looked really nice for future reference.

The road then led out of the mountains through Red Lodge, which we hit at sunset - a great little town, home of Crazy Creek Chairs (we like ours!), with flags lining the charming main street. We cut over to the main highway through fields of wheat and hay in the rolling hills, and headed home. This was the part of the road where the bugs were so bad that we ran out of window washing fluid - we were running it constantly just to be able to see. We had to pull over at a rest stop and use Windex, which we happened to have in the car. A family in a minivan saw me doing that and asked if they could use some - it was bad out there! A few minutes later, it didn't even matter. We bought a gallon of windshield fluid when we got into Livingston before continuing back to the RV Park. Happy Independence Day bugs! Be free of our windshield!

Along the highway, we saw lots more fireworks - it seemed every little ranch and small hamlet along the way had huge fireworks going off!! What a fourth of July!! Enjoy the slideshow of the day below: