MEANDERING THROUGH MONTANA

Mike Yardley travels through the captivating landscapes of southern Montana.

Southern Montana is the Wild West of dreams and the Hollywood big screen, sprawling over a rugged and serene landscape. Red Lodge is a small-town charmer, edging the Yellowstone River. This sweet little town is nestled in the foothills of the Beartooth Mountains and lassoed by Custer National Forest. The main street, flanked by evocative old stone buildings, brims with enticements, from western-wear stores and antique shops to art galleries and great hospo options. Anyone with a sweet tooth mustn’t miss one of the best confectionary stores I have seen in a long time — Montana Candy Emporium. This Red Lodge institution has been a mainstay for decades, housed in a nostalgic building, brimming with nostalgic candy.

The handmade chocolate treats at the counter are sinfully good, but being in Montana, it would be rude not to stock up on huckleberry candy. I loaded up on  mouthfulls of huckleberry sour balls for road-trip sustenance.

Relax in the garden at Red Lodge Ales, share a massive margarita and pizza at Bogart’s, grab a burger at Red Box Car or wind down with a steak and whisky cocktail at The Pollard Hotel.  Red Lodge is the quintessential place where you’ll just want to kick back, shop, nosh and linger.

Just out of town, treat yourself to an exhilarating drive on the Beartooth Highway, a 64-mile stretch of US 212 from Red Lodge to Cooke City. Dubbed the most beautiful roadway in America, this jaw-dropping drive climbs to an astounding 11,000 feet above sea level. That’s nearly as high as the summit of Aoraki/Mt. Cook. Completed nearly 90 years ago, its stature as a bucket-list drive has not dimmed — and it certainly lives up to its hype as the ultimate high-country route.

Heading out of Red Lodge, I felt transported to Heidi’s Switzerland, with lodgepole pine forests and lush meadows rolling down to meet the road. Before long, the ascent became stark and dramatic, thrusting you up higher and higher into the grip of the Beartooth Mountains. The sprawling range features 20 peaks higher than Aoraki. Mile upon mile of switchbacks serves up epic views across the sweeping snow-clad tundra and bejewelled glacial tarns of the Hellroaring and Silver Run plateaus. You end up being higher on that highway than the snow line on the plateaus across the valley.

At Vista Point, the views staring down into the jaws of the Rock Creek canyon are another highlight. Just past the highway summit, the “Bear’s Tooth” comes into view — a narrow pyramidal spire of rock, carved by glaciation, that became the namesake of the Beartooth Mountains. It’s a cranking drive, if a little vertigo-inducing!

Beartooth Highway is only open from about May to mid-October, depending on snow. They’ve had some late, unseasonal snow dumps in June and even July, in recent years, so check ahead that the road is open.

The plains of southeastern Montana stretch out like a pancake, offering a more subtle beauty than the gnarly mountains to the west. A land of rolling hills, dusty bluffs and badlands, this is classic cattle and wheat country.

Just over an hour southeast of Billings, I drove to Little Bighorn Valley. A sequence of low-slung hills rises above the valley — it is sacred ground because it’s where the Battle of Little Bighorn took place in 1876,  between the US Army and Great Plains Indians. As many as 2000 Lakota and Cheyenne warriors encircled and routed the US Army, in ferocious defence of their ancestral way of life.

Perhaps there is no phrase in the English language that serves as a better metaphor for an untimely demise than “Custer’s Last Stand”. It was on the Little Bighorn battlefield, 800 acres of dry sloping prairies, that George Armstrong Custer and the soldiers of the 7th US Cavalry Regiment met their end.

The Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument chronicles the history of this world-famous engagement, offering a coherent look at how the battle developed, where the members of Custer’s contingent died on Last Stand Hill, and how it might have looked to the swarming warriors. It’s very easy to traverse the 7km-long battlefield, driving along the ridgelines, to all the key sites. The fight was an overwhelming victory for the Plains Indians, who were led by several major war leaders, including Crazy Horse and Chief Gall and had been inspired by the visions of Sitting Bull. They may have won the battle, but ultimately lost the war. Custer’s death galvanised the military. In subsequent months, they tracked down Sioux and Cheyenne warriors and forced them onto reservations in North and South Dakota, ending their independent, nomadic way of life.

Custer’s remains were eventually reburied at the US Military Academy at West Point in 1877. Below the battlefield, the adjacent National Cemetery was established in 1879, and it incorporates a self-guided tour of some of the more significant figures buried there. It’s an indelible encounter with the American story.

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