CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
The recorded total and the leg detail need reconciliation. Inspect the leg notes before using this record for timing or navigation. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
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Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
US-212 to 3,337 m. Snowbanks in July. From Red Lodge it runs 129 km to the finish; allow about 2 h 24 of riding. The highest point is about 3,350 m. Beartooth Pass is open in summer only - check it is open before you set off. The line favours views over speed.
Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast. For 3 km this is Beartooth Highway, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it.
Check the pass is open before you commit to it.
Red Lodge is the doorstep of the Beartooth Highway, and it knows it. A small town of just over two thousand people in south-central Montana, it sits at around five and a half thousand feet where the Beartooth Mountains meet the plains, and its main street of brick buildings, saloons, outfitters and cafes is lined with flower baskets in summer. Behind it, the huge granite wall of the range rises in a ragged line, still carrying snow in July.
Read the complete Red Lodge write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Beartooth Highway point 1 sits at 0 km, early in the day. Next is Beartooth Highway point 2.
At the top of the Beartooth Pass, the world drops away. You stand at about 10,950 feet on a broad, treeless plateau of granite, tundra and tiny lakes, with snowfields clinging to the shaded slopes even in midsummer. The air is thin enough that you will notice it when you walk, and the sky is a deep, dark blue. In every direction, the rock is old: the Beartooth range is made of some of the oldest rock in North America, nearly three and a half billion years old in places, and the landscape has the bare, scoured look of something that has seen a very long time pass.
Read the complete Beartooth Highway point 2 write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Beartooth Highway point 2 comes up 19 km in. Next is Beartooth Highway point 3.
This is the stretch where the Beartooth Highway shows off. After climbing out of the Rock Creek valley in a series of long switchbacks, the road emerges onto a vantage point with a big, open view back down the canyon. The Rock Creek Vista Point sits a little over nine thousand feet up, and from the railing you look down a deep glacial trough, a U-shaped valley carved by ice, with the road you have just climbed threading up its side and a tangle of peaks beyond.
Read the complete Beartooth Highway point 3 write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
39 km in you reach Beartooth Highway point 3. Next is Beartooth Highway point 4.
Cooke City is a tiny community at the end of the world, or so it can feel, wedged into a mountain valley just outside the north-east corner of Yellowstone National Park. It began as a mining camp in the 1880s, when prospectors found gold, silver and lead in the surrounding hills, and it was named for Jay Cooke, a financier who backed the Northern Pacific Railroad. The railway never came, however, and the boom faded, leaving a handful of log buildings and a small, hardy population.
Read the complete Beartooth Highway point 4 write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Beartooth Highway point 4, late in the day. Next is Beartooth Highway point 5.
The northeast entrance to Yellowstone is one of the quietest of the park's five gates, a small station on a road that runs west along Soda Butte Creek into the Lamar Valley. Here you leave the high, bare country of the Beartooths and enter a land of rolling sagebrush, cottonwood and wide meadows, with mountains rising on every side. It feels very different from the crowded geyser basins to the south, and many visitors say it is the best part of the park.
Read the complete Beartooth Highway point 5 write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Beartooth Highway point 5 sits at 129 km, late in the day.