Road to the Roof of Montana: 

The History of Beartooth Pass and the Highway That Conquered It

Section 1: A Landscape Shaped by Deep Time

Few stretches of roadway in North America sit atop rocks as ancient as those beneath the Beartooth Pass. The plateau traversed by the Beartooth Highway — designated U.S. Highway 212, stretching sixty-nine miles between Red Lodge, Montana, and the northeast entrance of Yellowstone National Park — is composed of gneisses, granites, and schists formed approximately 3.3 billion years ago (Axline 12). Geologists from Montana State University describe these as among the oldest exposed rocks in Montana and among the oldest known on Earth (Mogk et al. 4). The summit of Beartooth Pass sits at 10,947 feet above sea level in Wyoming. The Beartooth Mountains contain Granite Peak at 12,807 feet — Montana's highest point — along with more than twenty peaks exceeding 12,000 feet and an estimated 950 alpine lakes (U.S. Forest Service, Custer Gallatin National Forest).

The landscape was sculpted during the Pleistocene epoch by glacial action that scoured valleys, deposited moraines, and left behind the lake-dotted plateau visible today. Rock Creek canyon, through which the highway climbs its most demanding switchbacks, was carved by glacial meltwater cutting through Precambrian granite. This physical setting — extreme elevation, brief summers, and violent weather — has governed human activity in the region for thousands of years and continues to define the engineering demands of maintaining the road.

Section 2: Apsaalooke Stewardship

Long before any road was surveyed, the Beartooth Mountains formed a western boundary of the Apsaalooke, or Crow, world. Crow warrior Two Leggings described his people's territorial concept using the metaphor of a tipi: "My west lodge pole rests on the snow-capped Absaroka and Beartooth Ranges" (quoted in Nabokov 47). This poetic framing reflected a lived reality: the Mountain Crow division of the tribe, known as the Ashalaho, occupied the foothills and river drainages along the upper Yellowstone, using the mountain valleys for hunting elk and deer and for winter shelter from the open plains (Doyle 18). Scholars at Montana State University who have studied Apsaalooke oral traditions note that the tribe's historically and spiritually profound relationship with these mountains dates back more than six centuries, with ancestral passage routes through the high country predating European contact by many generations (Doyle 19).

Indigenous peoples more broadly traveled through the Beartooth range for at least 12,000 years before European American exploration, according to regional historical accounts (Missoulian, 29 Aug. 2016). The seasonal patterns of the Apsaalooke — moving from lower wintering grounds into the high mountains during summer — meant that passes like the Beartooth were well-known travel corridors. This knowledge was not lost on early Euro-American arrivals, who relied on Indigenous guides and established routes when beginning their own explorations of the mountains.

The Apsaalooke's relationship to their homeland was severed by a sequence of treaty reductions during the nineteenth century. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 acknowledged Crow control over approximately thirty-eight million acres, a territory that explicitly included the Absaroka and Beartooth ranges. Successive agreements — in 1868 and again in 1880 — reduced that territory dramatically, opening the Rock Creek Valley and the adjacent coal-bearing formations to Anglo-American settlement as early as 1882 (Montana History Portal, "Red Lodge").

Section 3: Coal, Rails, and the Town That Needed a New Future

The community of Red Lodge grew directly from the recognition that Carbon County's geology held commercially exploitable coal seams. James "Yankee Jim" George discovered coal along the Rock Creek Valley in 1866 while prospecting for gold, but the remoteness of the location and its position on Crow treaty land prevented development for two decades (Geology of Wyoming, "Red Lodge–Bear Creek Coal"). The 1880 treaty revision cleared the legal path to settlement, and by 1884 a small post office community existed. The decisive economic catalyst arrived in 1887, when the Rocky Fork Coal Company opened the first commercial mine, drawing hundreds of European immigrant workers — Finns, Scots, Irish, Italians, and Slavic peoples — who established distinct ethnic neighborhoods within the town (Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, "Red Lodge, Montana"). By 1889, the Northern Pacific Railway had completed a branch line from Laurel, transforming coal extraction into a major regional enterprise. At its population peak around 1915, Red Lodge supported approximately 6,000 residents (Montana History Portal, "Red Lodge").

The collapse of underground coal mining in Carbon County unfolded in stages after the First World War. Strip mining technologies developed in southeastern Montana began displacing deep-shaft operations during the 1920s. The West Side Mine closed in 1924; the East Side Mine followed in 1932. The Great Depression delivered additional blows, and the community's economic foundation was further shattered in February 1943, when an explosion in Smith Mine No. 3 near Bearcreek killed seventy-four men — the worst coal mining disaster in Montana history (Carbon County Historical Society and Museum). Red Lodge entered the 1930s already searching for a new economic identity, and local civic leaders understood that Yellowstone National Park, only roughly seventy road miles away, represented an enormous untapped opportunity — if only a reliable route could be built to reach it.

Section 4: Lobbying, Surveys, and the Push for a Highway

The idea of connecting Red Lodge to Yellowstone's northeast entrance by road had circulated at least since 1915, when early boosters promoted a route called the Black and White Trail. That attempt stalled when federal highway funding in the early 1920s was restricted to corridors linking large population centers (Raised in the West, "Building the Beartooth Highway"). A renewed campaign gained momentum as automobile tourism expanded through the decade. In 1925, federal surveyors F. E. Thieme and B. F. Kitt evaluated a possible route between Red Lodge and Cooke City, though their assessment raised concerns about the technical demands of the alpine terrain (Montana History Portal, "Beartooth Highway"). Initial engineering surveys found the high plateau route problematic, recommending against it in favor of lower-elevation alternatives.

The most persistent local advocate for the mountain route was Dr. J. C. F. Siegfried of Red Lodge, whose sustained lobbying campaign helped shift federal thinking toward the alpine corridor. Siegfried's efforts proved decisive: the eventual route followed the high Beartooth Plateau rather than a lower pass (Montana History Portal, "Beartooth Highway"). The passage of the Park Approach Road Act in 1931 provided the necessary statutory and financial framework, allocating federal funds specifically for roads providing access to national parks. Montana historian Jon Axline, who has served as the Montana Department of Transportation's historian since 1990, has documented a telling irony in how the project was actually sold to Congress: advocates in Red Lodge privately emphasized the park gateway angle, but when lobbying Washington, they stressed access to the mineral resources of the New World Mining District near Cooke City and to timber in the national forests — revenue streams that federal legislators found more persuasive than scenic tourism (Axline, as quoted in Missoulian, 29 Aug. 2016). The highway that would become famous for its scenery was funded largely on extractive-industry arguments.

Section 5: Five Years of Construction

Ground was broken in the summer of 1931, and crews attacked the project from two directions. On the Montana side, the contract went to Morrison-Knudsen of Boise, Idaho, a professional firm whose organized management brought Segment A — the harrowing climb from Red Lodge up Rock Creek canyon to the plateau — to completion by the end of the 1932 construction season. Workers used dynamite to blast through granite faces, hand tools and early heavy equipment to move debris, and sheer persistence to carve the switchbacks that now bear names like Frozen Man Curve, Deadman's Curve, and Mae West Curve — labels that speak plainly to the conditions workers encountered (Distinctly Montana, "The Beartooth Highway: Then and Now").

The Wyoming-side contractor, McNutt & Pyle, faced both logistical and organizational difficulties. Axline's account characterizes the firm's operations as marked by poor management and inadequate supervision, compounding an already difficult segment of terrain brimming with glacial boulders and subject to unpredictable weather (Missoulian, 29 Aug. 2016). Construction could proceed only a few months each year, given that meaningful snowfall can arrive at 10,000 feet in any calendar month. At least two workers died over the course of the project, and historical accounts note that incomplete records mean the full toll of injuries and fatalities may never be precisely known (Distinctly Montana, "The Beartooth Highway: Then and Now"). The project cost approximately $2.5 million — well under the $5 million federal estimate — and was completed on schedule.

By 1934, with construction nearly finished, the road still had no agreed-upon name. The National Park Service called it the Cooke City Road; Red Lodge businessmen called it the Red Lodge–Cooke City Highway; and the Billings Gazette had been pushing for "Beartooth Highway" since construction began (Missoulian, 29 Aug. 2016). The official opening took place on June 14, 1936. Visitors had traveled from as far as California and Maine to be among the first to cross the plateau (Distinctly Montana, "The Beartooth Highway: Then and Now"). By 1939, an average of four hundred vehicles per weekday used the road; weekend and holiday traffic regularly exceeded one thousand.

Section 6: The Orphaned Highway and the Problem of Stewardship

The Beartooth Highway's construction funding carried within it the seeds of a governance problem that persisted for decades. The Park Approach Road Act capped eligibility for national park approach roads at sixty miles; at sixty-nine miles, the Beartooth exceeded that limit, and the enabling legislation provided no maintenance appropriation (Federal Highway Administration, "An Orphaned Highway"). This created a jurisdictional vacuum. The Federal Highway Administration's own documentation refers to the road as the "orphaned highway," noting that no government agency claimed ownership of large segments through much of the highway's early history (Federal Highway Administration, "An Orphaned Highway").

By the late 1950s, sections under nominal National Park Service oversight had deteriorated significantly. A 1959 NPS proposal to designate the corridor as a national parkway was rejected by the Forest Service and local residents opposed to expanded NPS jurisdiction. In 1994, NPS formally requested a comprehensive Federal Highway Administration evaluation of the entire corridor. A 1997 steering committee convened by Montana's congressional delegation brought together representatives from the Forest Service, FHWA, NPS, and both state transportation departments to address funding, maintenance, and ownership questions (Federal Highway Administration, "An Orphaned Highway").

The highway's vulnerability to natural forces was made concrete in May 2005, when mudslides and rockslides damaged the Montana side in more than a dozen locations. A $20.4 million reconstruction contract followed; approximately 100,000 cubic yards of rock were removed from a half-mile section near the top of the switchbacks, with crews drilling down to bedrock to build new road supports. The highway remained closed for a full year. Today, the Montana Department of Transportation maintains the Montana sections at an annual cost approaching $1.1 million, covering plowing, rock removal, guardrail repair, and general upkeep, while the National Park Service retains maintenance responsibility for the Wyoming portion despite that segment lying entirely outside Yellowstone's boundary (Raised in the West, "Building the Beartooth Highway").

Section 7: Recognition and Continuing Significance

In 2002, the Federal Highway Administration designated a significant portion of the Beartooth corridor as an All-American Road, recognizing qualities — scenic, natural, cultural, and historical — so distinctive that the road itself constitutes a destination. In 2014, the National Park Service secured the highway's listing on the National Register of Historic Places (Distinctly Montana, "The Beartooth Highway: Then and Now"). These formal recognitions ratified what regional residents had understood since 1936: the road transformed the economic geography of Carbon County and southern Montana, converting a declining coal town into a gateway community for one of the continent's most visited natural landscapes.

The Beartooth Pass and the highway that crosses it occupy multiple layers of Montana history simultaneously. At the deepest level, the plateau preserves some of the oldest rocks accessible by automobile anywhere in the United States. Superimposed on that geological foundation is a record of Indigenous land use extending back thousands of years, followed by the rapid extractive development of the late nineteenth century, a Depression-era infrastructure project mixing civic boosterism with engineering ambition, and a continuing struggle to maintain a road that nature works reliably to reclaim. Montana Department of Transportation historian Jon Axline has written that the highway "opens a window in the spectacular scenic and natural environment of an alpine ecosystem that might not otherwise be available to most Americans" (quoted in Distinctly Montana, "The Beartooth Highway: Then and Now"). That observation applies with equal force to the historical record the highway embodies — accessible to anyone willing to look past the scenery at the forces, human and geological, that produced it.

Works Cited

Axline, Jon. The Beartooth Highway: A History of America's Most Beautiful Drive. History Press, 2016.

Doyle, Shane. "In Home Land." Mountain Journal, 2022, mountainjournal.org/public-lands-were-homelands-for-the-crow-nation/. Accessed 23 Apr. 2026.

Federal Highway Administration. "An Orphaned Highway." Public Roads, vol. 70, no. 1, July/Aug. 2006, www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/publicroads/06jul/03.cfm. Accessed 23 Apr. 2026.

Mogk, David W., et al. "Precambrian Rocks of the Eastern Beartooth Mountains." Tobacco Root Geological Society Field Conference, 2024. Summarized in "Field Guide: Red Lodge to Cooke City, Montana — The Beartooth Highway." Science Education Resource Center, Carleton College, serc.carleton.edu/research_education/mt_geoheritage/sites/beartooth_mountains/Red_Lodge_Beartooth_Pass_Cooke_City.html. Accessed 23 Apr. 2026.

Montana History Portal. "Beartooth Highway." Contributing institution: Montana Historical Society Library and Archives, www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/127462. Accessed 23 Apr. 2026.

Montana History Portal. "Red Lodge." Contributing institution: Montana Historical Society Library and Archives, www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/128466. Accessed 23 Apr. 2026.

Nabokov, Peter, ed. Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior. University of Nebraska Press, 1967.

"Building the Beartooth Highway: Book Celebrates 'America's Most Beautiful Drive.'" Missoulian, 29 Aug. 2016, missoulian.com/lifestyles/hometowns/building-the-beartooth-highway-book-celebrates-america-s-most-beautiful/article_50fbc5cd-cedb-5c51-8dcd-e1cef182b775.html. Accessed 23 Apr. 2026.

"Building the Beartooth Highway." Raised in the West Magazine, raisedinthewest.com/archives/building-the-beartooth-highway. Accessed 23 Apr. 2026.

Carbon County Historical Society and Museum. "Smith Mine & Stillwater Mine." www.carboncountyhistory.com/carboncountymines. Accessed 23 Apr. 2026.

"The Beartooth Highway: Then and Now." Distinctly Montana, www.distinctlymontana.com/beartooth-highway-then-and-now. Accessed 23 Apr. 2026.

U.S. Forest Service, Custer Gallatin National Forest. "Beartooth Scenic Byway — All American Road." www.fs.usda.gov/r01/custergallatin/recreation/explore-forest/beartooth-scenic-byway-all-american-road. Accessed 23 Apr. 2026.

Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. "Red Lodge, Montana." www.achp.gov/preserve-america/community/red-lodge-montana. Accessed 23 Apr. 2026.