​​Beartooth Highway

From deeply forested mountain slopes to the stunted ground cover of the high alpine tundra the Beartooths are a must see for any visitor. At nearly 11,000 feet, the summit of the Beartooth Pass gives way to spectacular views of the surrounding landscape formed by uplifting tectonic plates 80 to 55 million years ago. One can hardly fathom the engineering it took to construct such a highway, especially given the time frame it was built, 1931-1936. World renowned as a fantastic historic and scenic area, today it is also becoming an important place of research on global warming. To quote the Salt Lake Tribune of 1937; visitors are “shorn of the ego of human importance…on top of everything, where it seemed as though we could feel the spin of the earth beneath our feet and that we might at any moment be flicked off like insects into space” (Anonymous, p.46).