The Beartooth Highway
There’s always a first place on a list. For me, it’s the Bearthooth Highway— US Route 212 out of Yellowstone that dances along the Wyoming-Montana border before climbing Beartooth Pass to 10,947 feet and then sinking down to Red Lodge, MT.
Riding the Beartooth highway west to east unravels American frontierism. It begins in full containment mode—Yellowstone, our first national park, summer destination for millions. It ends somewhere else entirely: at the top of the earth in a reality that defies explanation.
My ride begins at Tower Junction, the gas-and-bathroom-hub in Yelllowstone’s norther core. It’s choked with holidaymakers reconnoitering and resupplying. RVs and SUVs sit becalmed in the pullouts, others wallow in the intersection. You have to cut through.
An amusement-park convoy of vehicles crawls west, splaying into the shoulder at the road’s every bob and weave, stopping mid-lane when beguiled by whatever mammal teases some fur—bear, bison, marmot, chipmunk. The amount of recording tech deployed is staggering: DSLR lenses the size of howitzers. Optics twitching in thermals. Forward observers linked to base through bluetooth repeaters.
Ride the centerline. Thread through and keep going.
Draped over the parks’ northern shoulders like a mantle, the road gets wider, faster, and more sweeping after the park’s Northeast Gate. The forest feels closer, a dark surround for the ribbon of highway. You can feel eyes on you from the thick. Watch for deer and cattle.
Silver Gate and Cooke City: Wild West towns with bone fide saloons, gift shops, and convoys of Extreme Adventurer Motorcyclists laden with Ridecrafter electronics, suits pressure tested to 20,000 leagues with automatic airbags, and daisy-chained bluetooth communication, pushing driving lights with wattage visible to distant planets. The tour leader leader, flinty and weathered as an ex-Navy Seal, grimaces as I pass.
212 goes north. And up. Traffic thins as the road climbs.
It’s all moonscape above the tree line. The clouds are within reach. Cold and crisp and clear.
All the energy spent paving, recording, mapping, set against this: An otherworldly place of rocks, water, and overpowering vistas. Its beauty defies commodification. Its gorges are a mainline to the center of the earth.
The energy of the landscape remains beyond us.
Onwards! 