QUOTE
Mudslides usually make the news only when they take out a neighborhood of expensive hillside homes or bury a major route like the Pacific Coast Highway. But for anyone headed to Yellowstone this summer, the only mudslide that matters is the one that began on May 19, closing a long stretch of the Beartooth Highway - U.S. 212 - between Red Lodge, Mont., and the Wyoming state line.
On a good map, the Beartooth looks like a schematic illustration of the small intestine. It is not the fast way from anywhere to anywhere else. It is not even the only way from anywhere to anywhere else. It is simply the most vertiginous way.
Most highways at least hint at an underlying economic purpose. They take you where the traffic wants to go, or at least where it used to want to go. But the Beartooth feels like a highway that was built just for the heck of building it. Whether you are driving west out of Red Lodge or east out of Cooke City, there comes a moment when you begin to wonder if the road will ever top out on Beartooth Pass, elev. 10,947, or whether it will just keep climbing in switchbacks forever. And you wonder, too, just how it was ever possible to build such a road. Somehow it makes sense that it was constructed in the mid-1930's, when earth-moving equipment was a lot smaller than it is now. It's easier still to imagine the highway having been carved out of the granite by small men using dental drills.
So far, everyone who has gone up the Beartooth Highway seems to have made it down, though no one knows how many have sworn not to make the trip again. At some points - the stunning drop into Rock Creek Canyon is one - a fear of heights is the only rational response. The Montana Highway Department is pledging to have repairs done by mid-October. In other words, it hopes to reopen the highway just in time to close it for winter.
On a good map, the Beartooth looks like a schematic illustration of the small intestine. It is not the fast way from anywhere to anywhere else. It is not even the only way from anywhere to anywhere else. It is simply the most vertiginous way.
Most highways at least hint at an underlying economic purpose. They take you where the traffic wants to go, or at least where it used to want to go. But the Beartooth feels like a highway that was built just for the heck of building it. Whether you are driving west out of Red Lodge or east out of Cooke City, there comes a moment when you begin to wonder if the road will ever top out on Beartooth Pass, elev. 10,947, or whether it will just keep climbing in switchbacks forever. And you wonder, too, just how it was ever possible to build such a road. Somehow it makes sense that it was constructed in the mid-1930's, when earth-moving equipment was a lot smaller than it is now. It's easier still to imagine the highway having been carved out of the granite by small men using dental drills.
So far, everyone who has gone up the Beartooth Highway seems to have made it down, though no one knows how many have sworn not to make the trip again. At some points - the stunning drop into Rock Creek Canyon is one - a fear of heights is the only rational response. The Montana Highway Department is pledging to have repairs done by mid-October. In other words, it hopes to reopen the highway just in time to close it for winter.
This is one of my favorite places. As the author says, it's a narrow, spectacular and completely pointless but exquisitely beautiful drive. I once had the "pleasure" of accidentally getting myself stuck on it when it closed for winter. Don't know how they missed me when checking the road, but when I got to the Wyoming end, a very sturdy and impassable "road closed" gate was locked up for the winter. So I turned around and went back to the Montana end (after a stop at the only thing along the road, a ranger station, also all locked up) only to find THAT gate locked up, too. Had to break the lock with the handle of my jack to get out.
For a really spectacular shot of the view from the summit, click this link. (It's too wide for the screen here.)
http://huskertsd.tripod.com/landscape/beartooth_pass.htm
