Beartooth Highway a spectacular ride

COOKE CITY, Mont. — To drive on the Beartooth Highway is to dance on top of the world. The mountainous landscape possesses thrilling, take-your-breath-away beauty.

We expect our time on the Beartooth Highway to be spectacular. It is a high performer on those exclamation-point lists of greatest roads in America. The serpentine roadway is lauded as "The Highway to the Sky" and "A Drive Along the Roof of the Rockies."

The Beartooth Highway begins and ends in Montana but makes a generous dip into Wyoming. It winds through Custer, Gallatin and Shoshone national forests, one of the most rugged and largest wilderness areas in the United States.

By tradition, the Beartooth Highway opens the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. The driving season lasts until Oct. 15. About 1,250 cars per day use the high-elevation route, according to the Montana Department of Transportation. The famed scenic drive is a 69-mile section of U.S. Highway 212.

Snowplows remain on standby when we drive the switchbacks over Montana's tallest mountains on May 27. We begin in Cooke City, situated at Yellowstone National Park's northeastern entrance. This old gold-mining town awakens as soon as the highway opens because townspeople depend on tourists almost exclusively.

From the beginning, it is clear that this is no ordinary drive through the mountains. A sign begs for caution: "Open Range. Expect cows on road." We glimpse a herd of elk and stop for picture-taking at a sparkling stream fringed with delicate, colorful wildflowers. We enter a forest of spruce, fir and lodge-pole pine mixed with stands of aspen, and almost immediately feel a change in elevation. Long-range views of snow-mottled mountains, wide valleys and lapis-blue alpine lakes span the windshield.

Once the two-lane starts twisting into hairpin curves, we marveled at more than just the scenery. The road is an engineering triumph. Construction began in 1932 and required five years to complete. The highway traverses the meeting point of several of North America's major geologic and tectonic features. Granite peaks scratch the sky. Glacier-carved cirques empty into U-shaped valleys.

Our car climbs higher and higher to 10,947 feet above sea level. Isolated and surreal, the Beartooth Plateau hides under a light blanket of snow. Small ice-crusted lakes and rounded boulders punctuate the tundra. Animal tracks cross wide-open spaces. A young man catches the wind with his snow kite and it pulls him across a field near Little Bear Lake.