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Corridors · Vol. 003Byway

Everything on the Beartooth is named for height

An All-American Road across Montana and Wyoming, one of nine scenic routes mapped in Montana, running past Yellowstone and two national forests.

Read the list of things Byway has surfaced along the Beartooth Highway and a pattern arrives before any of the individual names do. Rock Island Butte. Castle Mountain. Silver Run Peak. Sundance Mountain. Limestone Palisades. Cathedral Cliffs. Gramps Bluff. Clay Butte Lookout. Rock Creek Vista.

Butte, mountain, peak, palisades, cliffs, bluff, lookout, vista. Nine words for high ground on one road.

A road named by what it climbs

Most byways collect a mixture — a church, a diner, a river crossing, a courthouse. This one collects altitude. The exceptions are few enough to count: the Carbon County Museum, the Erma Number 1 Mine, and three springs named Corner, Three Corner and Wahb.

That is not a naming fashion. It is what there is. A road that spends its length above the trees passes very little that a person built, so the things worth marking are the shapes of the ground, and the people who marked them reached for the nine words above because those are the words that describe this.

Overlooks that say what they face

Six overlooks are surfaced along it, and their names run the other way from the Blue Ridge Parkway's. Where the Parkway numbers its pull-offs by milepost, the Beartooth's are named for the thing in front of them: Rock Creek Vista, Vista Point Observation Site, Crazy Creek, Pilot Index, Falls.

Both habits solve the same problem — how do you tell one gap in a guardrail from the next — and they solve it in opposite directions. One tells you where you are on the road. The other tells you what to look at once you have stopped.

What it runs past

Measured against the committed boundaries, the corridor comes within reach of Yellowstone and of two national forests, Custer Gallatin and Shoshone. It is one of nine scenic routes Byway has mapped in Montana, and it is designated an All-American Road across both Montana and Wyoming — the Federal Highway Administration's judgement, not ours.

The song

Volume 003 of the byway series is Then Keep Climbing. On a road whose every landmark is a word for high ground, the instruction is the only one available.

The song · Vol. 003

Then Keep Climbing

On Byway
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