2015 western Trip – Day 14 – The Most Beautiful Drive In America

Thus is the description the late Charles Kuralt gave to the Beartooth Highway (BT), a 68 mile long road connecting Red Lodge and Cooke City, MT which opened in June 1936 – I cannot imagine building this road back then or even now for that fact.  But before we even got on the BT, we traveled the 46 mile long Chief Joseph Scenic Hwy (CJ) from just north of Cody, WY to where it hits the BT about 15 miles east of Cooke City, MT – both the BT and CJ are closed in the winter requiring the road through the NE Yellowstone entrance to be maintained to prevent Cooke City from being cut off in the winter.

While the BT is the more famous of the two, the CJ is no slouch when it comes to awesome scenery - pasture, mountains, wetlands - and tight curves.  Rather than add a lot of words here, I’ll just post photos and you can click on above the links if you want more info or photos Unfortunately our views and shots were affected by a smoky haze from western wildfires.

The BT is an engineering masterpiece as it switches back it;s way up and down the mountain - it's like Lombard St. in San Francisco with more distance between the curves.

As we ascended to Beartooth Pass, I was continually amazed at the abundance of lakes the amount of water in them and small streams that seemed to be on top of the mountains.

Then we finally saw the source of the water - snow that was still melting.

We continued to wind our way through the switch-back curves toward the summit and it's spectacular views.

I would love to have made this drive on a very clear day.  We have been on four very scenic western American drives: this one, the Going-To-The-Sun-Road in Glacier NP, the road (US-34) up the east side of RMNP, and the Million Dollar Hwy (US-550) in south central CO.  The views in all but the last one were negatively impacted by the smoky haze from wildfires burning somewhere in the West and often hundreds of miles away.  I guess we need to make these trips in the late spring/ early summer if we want to see them at their clear best.

Photos can be enlarged by clicking on them.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by Almost Heaven South.

Larry

8/6/15 event date