Red Lodge, Montana.

My usual Thursday post features the current Lens-Artists Challenge. The Lens-Artists team is on holiday, but we will be back with the first Lens-Artists Challenge post of 2024, on Saturday, January 6. Today’s post features my favorite Travel Tuesday post of 2023. The featured photographs tell a picture story of our trip on the Beartooth Highway that travelers can drive from Yellowstone Park to Red Lodge, Montana. It is a beautiful high-country drive in the summer, but if you want to see the snow on the mountains, you’ll have to provide your own snowmobile as the highway is closed from the first snowfall until spring.

You can visit virtually my favorite highway in Wyoming and Montana from my original January 31 2023 post here: /2023/01/31/the-beartooth-highway-the-highway-to-the-sky/

The Lens Artists team will be back on task at noon on Saturday, January 6.

John Steiner

Red Lodge, Montana.

In December 2022, I shared photos from the North Shore of Lake Superior between Duluth and Grand Marais, Minnesota. I called that highway an All-American Road, a designation from the U.S. Forest Service. From their website, “All-American Roads provide motorists an exceptional traveling experience that makes the byway a primary reason for the trip.” Today’s Travel Tuesday post features another All-American Road that was designated in June 2000.

The description of today’s featured highway states, “From the Northeast Entrance of Yellowstone National Park, Beartooth Scenic Byway All American Road weaves through Custer and Shoshone National Forests. The spectacular Alpine highway runs almost 69 miles to Red Lodge, Montana.” My opening photo features a view of one of the highest points along the Beartooth Highway, but we entered the highway at a much lower elevation at Yellowstone Park and ended our journey at Red Lodge, Montana.

The journey started for us at Gardner Montana and we entered the north entrance of the park just south of Gardner. Once inside the park, we followed the highway toward the Mammoth Hot Springs. To pick up the Beartooth Highway, there is a turnoff from U.S. 89 called the Grand Loop Road. Take that highway to the south and east of the main highway in the park.

After plenty of opportunities to spot wildlife in the park, you’ll eventually come to the junction at the Grand Loop Road and U.S. 212, the Beartooth Highway that starts here. Just before you arrive at the junction, there is a public gas station. Be sure you leave Gardner with plenty of fuel to travel to Red Lodge, however, if you aren’t traveling between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The station was closed for the season on October 5, the day of our journey. The gas station, though, is just west of the 212 highway junction, so be ready to turn.

I have many photos of bison that I didn’t share, and there are parking areas where you can stop, but keep your distance. These large animals appear to be quite gentle until they get upset. Then you want to be in your vehicle and somewhere else.

Once on the Beartooth Highway, you’ll notice the elevation changes relatively quickly as you transit from forest to high alpine climates. The views from the highway pulloffs are well worth the journey.

Though the highway is closed all winter long, there are plenty of snowmobile trails that remain open. There are even a few businesses that cater to the winter travelers, but during the pandemic, most of these places closed for the season. Be sure to plan your trail route ahead of time and confirm the places you want to visit will be open when you arrive after the highways are closed.

Once you transition to U.S. 212, you’ll spend an hour or so (depending upon photo stops) to travel the 30 miles (48 km) journey to Silver Gate, then only 5 minutes later, you’ll arrive at Cooke City.

You’re not quite half-way to Red Lodge from Cooke City, and in fact, the road meanders southerly back into Wyoming for the next several miles of spectacular scenery.

When U.S. 212 meanders through Wyoming and toward the Montana border, you will find the trees starting to become scarcer as you near the elevations that mark the tree line.

As you start the climb in earnest, you’ll travel a section of steep switchbacks eventually reaching Beartooth Pass where there is a parking and viewing area. Beartooth Pass is the highest point on the highway at an elevation of 10,947 ft (3,337 m) above sea level.

From Beartooth Pass, however, you are still some 31 miles (50 km) from the town of Red Lodge. Though you will be generally downhill to Red Lodge, you will still be doing some of those steep zigzags on the way down.

Be sure to do appropriate planning for your trip. There are lodges and hotels along the way, but they fill up fast during the season. I’m posting this in January even though the highway is closed in winter so you have time to do your homework and get reservations confirmed while there are still openings. If you travel before or after that Memorial-Labor Day window, you’ll have better luck in finding hotels at the last minute. We stayed in Red Lodge on October 5 and had no trouble finding a hotel. However, a turn of early season bad weather could have just as easily closed the highway for the season before we arrived.

Another thing to keep in mind is that there are fees to enter Yellowstone on the west end of the highway, and during the summer travel season, this highway is well-traveled. Be sure to check to see if you need a reservation to enter the park on the day you expect to arrive. The Recreation.gov site will provide a reservation slot for one of the most popular national parks in the country.

The Beartooth Highway is one of the most scenic highways we’ve traveled over the last few years. At Red Lodge, it was time for an oil change. We stopped at a local shop and learned that the owner of the shop had just purchased one of the restaurants just off U.S. 212. We’d noticed the place was closed on our way by. It was being remodeled by the new owner. He was anxious to get the work done in the next couple of weeks as he needed the road open for hauling building materials and he had only a couple of weeks before the road closed for the season. He had an ambitious schedule as he wanted the place open to take advantage of the winter snowmobile travelers. We wished him luck a successful opening and continued on our journey.

I have posted all of these images in 2K HD on my Flickr site. Click on a single image to pixel peep, or you can visit the entire album and scroll through the pics from here.

John Steiner

On the road in Wyoming.

After spending a couple of days in Yellowstone Park in the autumn of 2020, on October 5, 2021, we again found ourselves entering the park. This time, however, we were heading toward a highway we had not traversed in our earlier visit to the park.

Enter the northern entrance of the park at Gardiner, Montana, then proceed to the Mammoth Hot Springs area. Look for the left turn that will put you on U.S. 212 in the park and head east. When you leave the park, you’ll see signs that you are on the Beartooth Highway, the highest highway in both Wyoming and Montana. Technically, the highway is defined as starting at Cooke City and straddling the Wyoming and Montana borders eventually ending at Red Lodge, Montana.

The highway is closed in the winter, and with parts reaching above 10,000 feet (3048 m), there are even occasional snowstorms in the middle of summer. We were happy to find the highway still open in October with no snow in sight. Along the route are plenty of viewpoints, and in a future post, I’ll feature the scenic byway in a Travel Tuesday post.

About the photo: On our first viewpoint stop after exiting Yellowstone Park, near the junction of Wyoming highway 296, we were still well below the treeline in altitude and ready to begin our climb to Beartooth Pass at 10,947 feet (3,337 m.) This image features a view of the highway that is paved along the entire route. If memory serves, I aimed the camera to the west to capture the mountains in nearby Yellowstone Park.

Captured with my Samsung S20U, this image was imported into Lightroom for basic tweaks and sent off to Luminar AI to increase structure, remove some of the haze, and enhance the sky (not sky replacement.) I then uploaded the image to Flickr so you can pixel peep it in 2K HD. Simply click on the image to check out the metadata and get a closer view stored there on the Flickr site.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never have a specific topic for this feature, and the only rules are that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or another mobile device… If you have an image from a drone, that’s acceptable as well. The second rule is to link your challenge response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post in the comment.

John Steiner