Bearly Spring

BEARTOOTH MOUNTAINS, Mont. — Summer comes late to Top of the World.

It’s mid-June, and we are driving through a canyon of snow with walls that dwarf our compact car, blocking views of everything but a slice of blue sky above. Each wall exposes horizontal layers--like the geological layers in a canyon--marking storm upon winter storm that dropped enough snow to bury the few brave spruce trees that cling to these high slopes. We can traverse this snowbound realm only because snowplows chewed their way over our route a few weeks earlier.

As we exit the titanic snowdrifts, the parallel walls fall away, and suddenly we can see 360 degrees in all directions. It’s like sitting in the crow’s nest of a wayward ship, as the road ahead snakes into a rough, unending sea of white-capped mountain peaks.

Heaven, I think to myself, must not be far above.

Few other roads cover the kind of ground that the Beartooth Highway does in its 69 miles, going from the northeast corner of Yellowstone National Park, past the settlement called Top of the World (elevation 9,200 feet), to the understated Montana town of Red Lodge about halfway between Yellowstone and Billings. The road scales the Beartooth Mountains to nearly 11,000 feet, swerving eastward, back and forth over the Montana-Wyoming state line, past glacier-carved granite and mirror-like lakes that in midsummer are embraced by meadows of wildflowers. Mountain goats tiptoe along precipices in view of the highway--a narrow corridor of civilization jutting through massive parcels of federally protected wilderness.

But the vagaries of civilization are now catching up with the spectacular route officially known as U.S. Highway 212.

In short, nobody wants it.

Or, perhaps more accurately, nobody wants to pay for it.

Although the Beartooth Highway lies outside Yellowstone Park, park crews have long cleared snow off most of the road and patched its weather-worn pavement each summer because highway departments in Wyoming and Montana would not take on the job. Montana workers care for the 24 eastern-most miles in Montana, but highway departments in both states have otherwise declined to take on the job. With a slim budget, Yellowstone managers now say they can no longer afford the work, either.

“It’s a very difficult position we find ourselves in,” Yellowstone Park Supt. Michael Finley explained. “People love that road. But our primary obligation is to the park, and we just cannot spread our employees any thinner than they are.”

Closed all winter, the highway typically opens for the season on Memorial Day weekend (this year May 24-25). Autumn snows shut it down in September or October. If there were no snowplows to cut through the deep drifts still blanketing the highway when summer rolls around, the popular route might not open until late summer, if at all. Even last year, the road opened three weeks late because there was no money to pay park snow-clearing crews for overtime work.

Yellowstone National Park managers plan to plow and maintain the road, at an annual cost of about $200,000, through this summer. But, as of this writing, they will not commit to anything beyond, leaving the highway’s fate hinging on a request by Wyoming and Montana officials for special funding from Congress.

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It was into this bureaucratic twilight zone that my wife, Sue, and I drove from our home in Cody, Wyo., about two hours away, early last summer to see what the public might miss. We did not find a cure for what ails the highway, but in two days of driving (with a night spent camping at Beartooth Lake), we did find spectacular high country populated with wildlife and trimmed by waterfalls that cries out for an audience around every twist and turn.

We started at Cooke City, Mont., a small mountain community and former mining town now stocked with restaurants, motels and shops just outside the northeast entrance of Yellowstone Park. Cooke City flourishes during the height of summer, quiets down in fall and fills with snowmobilers in winter. Almost every summer passersby either arrive or depart by way of the Beartooth Highway, so the road’s survival is paramount here. It’s about as big a deal as the gold mine proposed for the high peaks just north of town. We came to this conclusion while chewing over the issue, and tart sourdough pancakes, at Joan and Bill’s Family Restaurant. The proposed mine drew enough attention that President Clinton last year pledged $65 million in federal funds to pay the mining company to abandon the project.

“We’ve got to protect this place,” advised Ralph Glidden, a mine opponent who runs the Cooke City Store, a mercantile shop full of local crafts, trinkets and camping provisions. “We need to save some places that are too special to exploit.”

Dark, serrated mountaintops that cut into the clouds around Cooke City are the worn and torn remnants of a volcanic field driven by the same underground hot spot that powers Yellowstone’s hot springs and geysers. Glaciers have since sculpted the volcanic cores of Pilot and Index peaks east of Cooke City into rugged American replicas of the Matterhorn.

No local volcanoes rumble now, but they last added to the landscape only about 40 million years ago--barely a tick on the geologic clock.

In this way, the Beartooth Highway spans time as well as distance. Beyond the relatively young volcanic formations, travelers find pinkish granite and other rock outcrops that geologists call the continent’s Precambrian basement. Formed 2.7 billion years ago during the Precambrian period, the terrain usually lies deep underground, where it serves as the foundation for most modern landscapes. In the Beartooths, though, the smashing together of continental plates has shoved the formation to the surface, where overlying sediments have eroded away, giving visitors intimate views of the planet’s distant past.

Tracing the edge of the Clarks Fork Yellowstone River, we passed the turnoff to Wyoming Highway 296, the Chief Joseph Scenic Highway that leads toward Cody, Wyo. It follows the path that Chief Joseph and his rebellious band of Nez Perce Indians took before the U.S. Cavalry caught up and drove them back to their reservation in 1877.

Waterfalls flew by on both sides of the road until we arrived at Beartooth Lake, which calmly reflected snow-spotted Beartooth Butte above it. The steep-sided butte is an oddity, a hunk of recent earth that the Precambrian basement rock has not yet shed to the elements. A rust-colored layer across the butte is the signature of an ancient river channel and holds fossils of the fish that once swam there. Fossil collecting is permitted as long as you do not plan to sell your finds.

An easy, half-day hike takes off from the U.S. Forest Service campground along the lake shore and climbs along the base of Beartooth Butte. (Trail maps of Beartooth Lake are available from the U.S. Forest Service office in Red Lodge and in shops in both Cooke City and Red Lodge.) The trail then loops by a chain of small lakes set within green meadows like a string of jewels. Their waters were so clear and calm that our golden retriever tried to retrieve trout that he saw darting through the water in the shallows.

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After crossing a few creeks and skirting the sinuous shore of Beauty Lake, we found ourselves back at the green expanse fronting Beartooth Lake, a good place to see moose chomping away at waterside vegetation. Grizzly bears do live in the Beartooth Mountains, so most campgrounds feature bear-proof food storage cabinets. As long as you use them--as well as common sense--it’s simple to avoid grizzly run-ins.

We found that a good place to recover from a hike lies beyond Island Lake: the Top of the World Store and settlement that sits, well, pretty near what around here is the top of the world and offers plenty of souvenirs commemorating that proximity.

THWAP!

We thought a rock had landed on the car until we noticed, first of all, that we were nowhere near a rocky precipice and, second, that potato chips were scattered like shrapnel on the car’s floor. Our precious bag of chips, it seems, had expanded in the thinning, high-altitude air until it exploded.

With elevation comes respect for the engineers who pushed the highway across a land that lies under snow almost three-quarters of the year. Permanent snowfields abound. Permafrost seals the ground just beneath the surface, and only the most tenacious plants survive. It’s important not to drive off the road because tire scars and other wounds heal at a glacier’s interminable pace.

Construction of the highway began in 1931 under a Depression-era initiative to build roads that would serve as gateways for national parks such as Yellowstone. While the legalese called for the states to take over maintenance of the road just as they do interstate highways, neither Wyoming nor Montana has ever wanted to do so.

And neither state wants anything to do with the bill for repairing frayed segments of the roadway, at a cost that may run as high as $32 million.

So it’s by default that the Beartooth Highway--and its costs--has stayed in federal hands. The U.S. Interior Department’s Inspector General, a watchdog for the National Park Service’s parent agency, has urged Yellowstone management to charge the states for their highway-related expenses. So far they have not.

Montana and Wyoming congressional delegations want Congress to appropriate money for Yellowstone Park crews to plow the highway until other federal agencies can rebuild it, a job that is expected to take up to 10 years. Montana officials have promised to take over plowing of the Montana stretches of the road once they are rebuilt, Yellowstone officials say, but Wyoming has made no similar commitment.

“Something has to give, because it just cannot be done without some more money from somewhere,” said Yellowstone spokeswoman Marsha Karle.

Last year we drove past lakes still covered with ice and switchbacked up to Beartooth Pass, at 10,947 feet the nation’s highest highway pass that does not cross the Continental Divide. A yellow-bellied marmot chattered and dove among the rocks at a nearby overlook where only the earliest-blooming wildflowers had managed to splash color.

Chilling breezes at such an altitude called for a jacket, and snow can fall any time of the year. Two years ago, an Independence Day blizzard blocked the highway for a day or so.

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Nearly a dozen glaciers survive in the encircling mountains where snowfall outpaces snowmelt. One is called Grasshopper Glacier for the swarm of grasshoppers that were locked into the ice three centuries ago. Here and there snowbanks take on a pink tint, the color of decaying bacteria that have filled unoccupied niches that apparently exist amid ice crystals.

The deepest snow canyons cradle the road among the highest peaks. In every direction the terrain is one of beautiful simplicity shaped by relentless cold. Vegetation grows no higher than your ankle, and the rocks that jut from the green carpet have been polished smooth, first by glaciers and then by the fierce elements. Milky clouds coat the horizon.

In the distance--just east of Beartooth Pass--is a canine-shaped formation that roadside signs identify as the Bear’s Tooth, although it is clearly one of many.

A steep chain of switchbacks leads us down, down from the peaks and along Rock Creek, which crashes and splashes its way to Red Lodge, a mining-turned-tourist town that doubles as a ski resort. We admired the burnished wood trim in the richly refurbished, turn-of-the-century Pollard Hotel and stopped for some flavorful black bean soup across the street at Serrano’s. Main Street is a mix of shops, offices and homey restaurants, almost all of which last summer helped collect nearly 20,000 signatures on petitions urging that somehow, somebody, somewhere needs to figure out a way to keep the Beartooth Highway alive.

“It’s an experience no one should have to miss,” said Jeff Kyro, owner of a local motel. “We want to look for constructive answers because we know that everybody is asking everybody else for money these days, and it’s just not there.”

It’s a modern maxim that even the Beartooth Highway cannot escape. The bottom line, it seems, is money. Even at Top of the World.

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GUIDEBOOK

Beartooth Background

Getting there: Fly from LAX to Bozeman, Mont., on Delta, changing planes in Salt Lake City, or fly Alaska Airlines through Seattle. Advance-purchase, round-trip fares start at about $340 including tax.

Where to stay: More than a dozen public campgrounds line the Beartooth Highway as it passes through the Gallatin, Shoshone and Custer national forests. Camping fees average about $10 per night, per site. In midsummer, many sites fill early in the day. Contact Gallatin National Forest, P.O. Box 130, Bozeman, MT 59771, telephone (406) 587-9054; Shoshone National Forest, 808 Meadow Lane, Cody, WY 82414, tel. (800) 416-6992; Custer National Forest, P.O. Box 2556, Billings, MT 59103, tel. (800) 280-2267.

Road conditions: Yellowstone National Park, P.O. Box 168, Yellowstone Park, WY 82190; tel. (307) 344-7381.

For more information: Travel Montana, 1424 9th Ave., P.O. Box 200533, Helena, MT 59620-0533; tel. (800) VISIT-MT. Wyoming Tourism Commission, I-25 at College Drive, Cheyenne, WY 82002; tel. (800) 225-5996.