Beartooth Highway scenic switchbacks
— — a road that folds back on itself to reach the sky.
Not only on a wall.
“The hairpins of US 212 climbing the Beartooth Front, stacked one above the other up the side of Rock Creek Canyon. From the West Summit overlook on the Montana side the road shows as a series of ribbons cut into the cliff face, each turn rising about 250 feet above the last. Charles Kuralt called the highway the most beautiful drive in America when CBS Sunday Morning ran the route in the 1980s. The switchbacks are the reason. They are also the work of Civilian Conservation Corps crews in the early 1930s. from the studio
Beartooth Highway scenic switchbacks, on ceramic.
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The place, in three passes.
The switchback section of US 212 climbs the Beartooth Front from roughly 5,500 feet at Red Lodge to about 10,947 feet at Beartooth Pass over a distance of about 25 miles, with the steepest run concentrated in the hairpins that ascend the wall of Rock Creek Canyon. The road was built between 1931 and 1936 with substantial labour from the Civilian Conservation Corps under the Federal Aid Highway Act, opened in 1936, and rebuilt several times after slides; the 2005 washout at the Mae West curve closed the Montana side for a full season. The highway is administered as Federal Highway Administration route under joint Wyoming-Montana DOT maintenance.
Late afternoon is the hour the switchbacks read best. The sun comes around the west wall of Rock Creek Canyon between four and six in the summer months and rakes the cut face of each hairpin in turn, picking up the gravel shoulder and the snow patches that linger into July at the higher turns. The West Summit overlook, near 9,400 feet on the Montana side, is the standard viewpoint for the stack of curves. Storms build over the plateau most summer afternoons and can move down the canyon faster than the road can lose elevation.
The most photographed view is from the West Summit pullout on the Montana side, about ten miles south of Red Lodge, where the stacked hairpins fill the frame. The road is open roughly Memorial Day through mid-October; the switchback section is usually the first to clear in spring and among the last to be plowed in autumn. Cyclists ride the climb in numbers in July; motorists should expect slow-moving traffic and limited passing. RV travel is permitted but tight at the inside corners. No services on the climb itself; Red Lodge holds the nearest fuel.