Ride Beartooth Highway MT side

The whole reason we came to Cody Wyoming is to ride the bear to highway. This road runs from red Lodge, Montana over the Beartooth pass and into Cooke city wyoming. Cook city is the north east entrance into Yellowstone National Park.

Beartooth highway is a scenic drive that’s designated as “an all American Road“. That designation is the highest designation a scenic by way can receive. Who knew that there were different levels of scenic by ways. All I know is this is in the top 10 motorcycle rides from any list you pull. Besides all that time we spent in Yellowstone this is the other big highlight of our trip.

The Beartooth Highway crosses Beartooth pass at 10,947 feet. The crews work really hard to get all the snow cleared by Memorial Day weekend. Even though the road is open starting memorial day weekend any little storm that comes through tends to drop feet of snow up on the mountain. We knew we were going to need to ride in cold weather and possibly rain but we picked the best two days to try to go ride this route. We wanted to ride going east to West, and then turn around and on a separate day ride it from west to east. The views are always so different in each direction.

As soon as we had a great weather day, we hit the road. I added two photos. One is an aerial view of the switchbacks on the Montana side. I also took a screenshot of the switchbacks on the road. This is one squirrel Road.

For this drive, we went all the way up into Montana and went from east to West so, Montana, over the pass and then down into Wyoming. The road was in great shape and the views were spectacular. So many twisted and turns. Then everything changed about halfway up the switchbacks. We got to a section of the road that got washed out many years ago. When they did the repair, they did a really bad job. Or I guess they did as best as they could. But boy that road was rough.

At the top of the switchbacks we were able park the bike for a minute and check out a great lookout where you’re able to look down at the switchbacks. It doesn’t look the same as the aerial photo of course, because we’re not right on top of the switchbacks but still pretty neat to see. We continued our ascent and started seeing lots of patches of snow on the side of the road. We’re getting closer to the top of the Beartooth pass. We’re also seeing lots of Alpine Meadows and tons of wildflowers. We are about to cross into the Wyoming side of Beartooth. But I need to continue that in the next post.Weiterlesen