Road Trip Yellowstone

by Dina Mishev

  Compactor Facility

  It seems Silver Gate has more art galleries than homes. The most interesting art space in the area is a surprise though—it’s the Cooke City Compactor facility, also known as the dump. When the facility was built in 2002, Steve Liebl was hired as manager (he was also a Realtor, caretaker, newsletter publisher, and Yellowstone firefighter). He soon began putting aside any art, books, or useable items people had thrown away. The dump became a bit of a social stop. Liebl hung the paintings and photographs on the walls inside the facility. There are now several hundred pieces of art. Steve died in 2006, but subsequent managers have kept the art collection, and also the book exchange Steve started. The hand-painted sign urging you to recycle was painted by students at the Cooke City School including Kelly Hartman, profiled on page 66. “I can’t believe it’s still up there,” Kelly says. “I painted that when I was in seventh or eighth grade.” Kelly says out of the hundreds of paintings locals do have a favorite. “There is this one landscape with a tree and a beautiful view,” she says. “I know lots of people have offered to buy it over the years, but none of the managers will sell it.”

  Cooke City is not technically a city. It’s not even a town. Neither Cooke City nor neighboring Silver Gate are incorporated, so technically they are communities.

  Cooke City Store

  Troy Wilson started visiting Cooke City when he was 7 years old. That was in 1977. By 1984, he was working at the Cooke City Store. Beth Gould worked at the Cooke City Store for the first time in 1990. Troy and Beth got married in 1992 and went into careers in, respectively, real estate and accounting. In 2003, Troy and Beth Wilson bought the Cooke City Store. They bought it from its owners of 26 years, Ralph and Sue Glidden. The Gliddens, who had come to Cooke City from Oregon to cross-country ski for a winter, also found themselves buying the store after working at it for a couple of years.

  The store was built by John Savage and John Elder on land owned by the earliest known miner in the area. It was first called Savage & Elder’s. In the 1880s and 1890s, Cooke City was boom and bust—the population ranged from twenty residents to 1,000—and the general store boomed and busted with it, going through several ownership changes in the process. The name was changed to the Cooke City Store in 1906. It is one of the oldest still-operating general stores in Montana. On its centenary, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. While the goods on the oak shelves have changed over the store’s life, the shelves themselves haven’t. They’re original, as is the Premiere Jr. hand-cranked cash register still used to ring up sales. 101 Main St., (406) 838-2234, cookecitystore.com

  Beartooth Café

  It’s doubtful the Beartooth Café has changed much since it was founded in 1979. This is a good thing. The cozy, log cafe is exactly what you’d want to find in a town with a three-block “downtown.” (And the chocolate chip cookies are much better than you’d expect to find in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere.) Ownership has changed but not that often. Employees have come and gone, but current co-owner Vicki Denniston (the other two owners are Deb Purvis and Vicki’s husband, Scott) says some of today’s employees are the fourth generation of their family to work at the cafe.

  Scott himself started as an employee before buying into the cafe with Vicki in 2007. One of Scott’s friends at a small state college in West Virginia had worked at the Beartooth Café one summer and planned to go back the following summer. “The second time, I came out with him,” Scott says. That was in 1997. Scott worked as a dishwasher and host. And then he came back. It was his second summer in Cooke City that he met Vicki, whose great-grandfather came to Cooke City in the 1930s. In 1998, Scott was back at the Beartooth and Vicki was working for her aunt, who owned the two buildings on either side of the cafe. “I used to watch Vicki carrying merchandise across the deck,” Scott says. The two married in 2000. They now have four kids and the oldest two work full time in the cafe. “All four of them have helped out though,” Vicki says. “And they love it. They tell us all the time, ‘You can’t sell it. We love being here.’”

  The family lived full time in Cooke City until 2011, when Bobbi Dempsey, the longtime teacher at the Cooke City School, was retiring. Three of the couple’s kids went to the Cooke City School. “At one point, there were six kids in the school and three of them were mine,” Vicki says. “With Bobbi retiring and Mikayla going to be in the fifth grade, we thought it was time to move to Livingston.” Scott says, “Winters in Cooke City are beautiful and really special—a friend and I had a tradition of going out and getting Christmas trees together—but they are a lot of work. You have to deal with the elements. You’re shoveling constantly.” Vicki says, “In a bad year, spring won’t come to Cooke City until July. In a good year, you can have some nice warmups in April and May you can see a few flowers blooming.”

  The Beartooth Café is open every day between late May and late September and the Dennistons live in Cooke City all summer. “I like to think it’s a staple in the community,” Vicki says. “We’ve kept everything as consistent as possible. The owner Scott worked for had some great recipes—people really like the lasagna—and we kept most of them. People who ate here 30 years ago come back now and it is almost the exact same.”

  One thing that has changed is the demographics of the cafe’s thirty seasonal staffers. “We have kids now come from all over the world to work here,” Vicki says. “Last year we had two girls from China, two kids from the Czech Republic, a boy from Romania, one from Turkey, and college students from all over the US. We’ve even had college professors that have worked for us dishwashing. People just want to be here in the summer. It’s fun.”

  FYI: The cafe bakes four different kinds of cookies—chocolate chip, peanut butter, ginger snap, and oatmeal raisin—fresh every morning. Vicki warns that they sell out fast. 14 Main St., (406) 838-2475, www.beartoothcafe.com

  ROAD TRIP 6 HIGH COUNTRY

  The interesting geology doesn’t end at the borders of Yellowstone National Park. No areas show this more than the Beartooth and Absaroka (pronounced ab-ZORE-ka) mountains on the park’s northeast border. Much of the two ranges are protected by the 943,648-acre Beartooth-Absaroka Wilderness, which was created in 1978. Though these ranges are neighbors, they are very different. The Absarokas are composed of volcanic and metamorphic rock, while the Beartooths are granitic with some rocks dated to be 4 billion years old, making them some of the oldest exposed rocks on the planet. The Beartooths are also considered the most biologically unique mountain range in the country, have twenty-five peaks higher than 12,000 feet, and include the largest high-elevation plateau in the Lower 48 states.

  Top of the World

  If you’re pedaling your road bike from Cooke City to Red Lodge via the Beartooth Highway, which hundreds of cyclists do every summer because it’s one of the country’s classic alpine rides, you’ll be disappointed when you get to the Top of the World Resort. Everyone else traveling by car on this scenic highway will greet the Top of the World with a smile. Why these different reactions? Coming from the west, the Top of the World Resort is still 1,500 feet below the top of the climb that culminates in crossing the Beartooth Pass. So, for cyclists, it’s a cruel joke.

  LOCAL LOWDOWN BEN ZAVORA, Founder of Beartooth Powder Guides

  The mountains around Cooke City often have more snow than anywhere else in the Lower 48 states. Snowmobilers realized this a long time ago; skiers have only recently become aware of this. The opening of Beartooth Powder Guides (BPG) in late 2012 by Ben Zavora is spreading the news. BPG not only does guided ski outings, but also has a backcountry log cabin and yurt you can rent for the night. Ben’s permit from the Forest Service requires the yurt be taken down each spring, but the cabin is available to rent year-round. When the snow finally melts, it’s a great base camp for hiking in the Beartooth mountains. (406) 838-2097, beartoothpowder.com

  Q: Where did the idea of opening a ski guiding company in Cooke City come from?

  BEN ZAVORA: I lived in
Bozeman for 15 years and had skied in the backcountry around Cooke City a few times every winter. And then I had a life change where I had to start from scratch. I decided to restart in Cooke City and rebuild with my dream business.

  Q: Did you grow up skiing?

  BZ: I grew up in Encinitas, California, and was always into skiing and the mountains more than the beach. I’d ski at Mammoth. I eventually decided to become a ski bum and moved to Squaw Valley. There I met a fellow who is still one of my best friends. The following winter he moved to Bozeman. He called and told me he found the best spot to be a powder skier. I moved to Bozeman in the fall of 1996.

  Q: The BPG office in Cooke City is across the street from Bearclaw Bakery. Is that dangerous?

  BZ: Super dangerous. I stopped and got two pieces of carrot cake this morning.

  Q: How many days a year do you ski?

  BZ: It depends on the time of year. November tends to be a lot of chores—working on getting firewood for the cabin and yurt and stuff. December and January, I’m doing my avalanche education season, so I’m out teaching 3 or 4 days a week for 2 months. February, March, and April is our peak guiding season; that’s when I’m out the most.

  Q: How are the yurt and cabin different?

  BZ: They’re only 10 miles apart as the crow flies, but they are completely different geologically. The terrain around the yurt—you’re right at alpine level, at 9,500 feet—it’s granite and big alpine terrain. At the cabin, you’re in the healthiest whitebark pine forest in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. It’s great tree skiing.

  Q: Do you have a favorite between the two?

  BZ: The cabin is very dear to my heart because I built it, but they are so different. My favorite would be the cabin for December, January, and February and the summer and the yurt for March and April.

  Q: When you say you built the cabin, are you being literal?

  BZ: Yes. I logged it all by hand right off the property—standing dead timber. It’s in an area where no motors are allowed, so I had to do everything by hand. It was hard work, but I still say it was the most fun 4 months of my life.

  Skiing is only part of being a good backcountry skier. Because backcountry skiing is done in areas where there is no ski patrol mitigating avalanche conditions, backcountry skiers must educate themselves about traveling safely in terrain that can be dangerous. BPG runs Beartooth Powder University to help skiers learn to do this.

  The Top of the World Store, which sells cold drinks, ice cream, and candy bars in what feels like the middle of nowhere, predates the completion of the Beartooth Highway. The store opened directly across from the boat ramp for Beartooth Lake in 1932. (The highway opened in 1936.) In the early 1960s, the Forest Service—it’s in the Shoshone National Forest—wanted the store to move. That happened at the end of the 1964 season. Since then, the store has been about halfway between Island and Beartooth Lakes. At its present location, the enterprise was able to grow. There is now a campground and modest motel—it has four rooms—in addition to the store. You can rent canoes and paddleboats and fishing rods, both for spin casting and fly fishing.

  Because the resort is surrounded by creeks and tarns—which you can fish in after getting the required permits—in July the mosquitoes are fierce. 2823 Hwy. 212, (307) 587-5368, topoftheworldresort.com

  Beartooth Highway

  The Beartooth Highway, which connects Cooke City with Red Lodge, Montana, passes through terrain no sensible road should. For an entire 10 miles, it is above 10,000 feet. (Its entire length is 68 miles.) It is the highest-elevation highway in Wyoming and Montana and in the northern Rockies. The late CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt pronounced the road “the most beautiful drive in America.” You’ll see a waterfall, too many high alpine lakes to count, snowfields, glaciers, the Beartooth Wilderness, and boulder fields. You could spot grizzly and black bears, moose, bighorn sheep, Rocky Mountain goats, elk, or a mountain lion. Between Cooke City and Red Lodge, the highway climbs and descends more than 6,000 feet.

  Built between 1931 and 1936, the Beartooth Highway was one of the first ten roads in the country to be designed a National Scenic Byways All-American Road, the highest honor related to scenery any road can get. (This happened in 2002.) You can’t get this level of beauty without some drawbacks though. The biggest one? It’s only open about 5 months of the year. The Beartooth Mountains get about 30 feet of snow every winter—too much for snowplows to deal with—and the highway crosses numerous avalanche paths. So even if the snowplows could keep up, it’s too dangerous for them to be in the area. It opens the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend (in May) and closes the Tuesday after Columbus Day (in October).

  Even when it’s open, chances are snowplows will have to do some work at its higher elevations. It has snowed at the summit of Beartooth Pass—10,987 feet—every month of the year. There is often a 30-degree temperature difference between Cooke City or Red Lodge and the top of the pass. The highway is also in danger from mudslides. In the spring of 2005, multiple mudslides destroyed about 12 miles of the highway on the eastern side of the pass. It cost $20 million to fix the road and took months. The repair work was finished only a few days before the road closed for the winter.

  Drivers who have a fear of heights need to steel themselves if they take this route. There are several instances where switchbacks cling to the side of a mountain and you can look down a couple of thousand feet. There are also instances of the opposite: where rock walls overhang the road and it’s so tight you can reach out and touch them. Mdt.mt.gov/travinfo/beartooth

  Biking the Beartooth Highway

  However you define an “epic” bike ride—views, difficulty, weather, terrain, mosquitos—the Beartooth Highway exceeds it. The ride between Cooke City and Red Lodge, Montana, is 68 miles. Over this distance, you climb 5,000 or 6,000 feet. (Cooke City has a higher starting elevation than Red Lodge, so there’s less climbing riding east.)

  On both sides, the climbing is spread over about 25 miles, so it is never terribly steep. There might be a section that’s 7 degrees in pitch, but nothing steeper. Ten miles in the middle undulate between 10,000 feet and 10,987 feet. Since tree line in this area is about 9,000 feet, there is nowhere to hide. Bring warm gloves and a hat to put on under your helmet.

  While this road is an engineering marvel, it was not constructed with cyclists in mind. When there is a shoulder, it is no more than 3 feet wide. This isn’t as disconcerting as it usually is on highways because the speed limit is slow, and the road’s twists, turns, and the surrounding scenery force drivers to stick to it. When it comes time for the descent, chances are cyclists will pass cars; bikes can handle the turns at higher speeds.

  This is also an epic ride for motorcyclists. Annually in mid-July, bikers come from across the country for the 3-day Beartooth Rally. (406) 425-7397, beartoothrally.com

  Beartooth Basin Summer Ski Area

  Just below the top of Beartooth Pass is the only ski area in the country that’s open for summer and not winter. Its season starts Memorial Day weekend and ends July 4 . . . snow conditions permitting. In 2015 and 2016, snow conditions did not permit. “All we need is an average winter,” says Justin Modroo, one of the resort’s five owners. “But we rarely have an average winter.” Justin says the owners flew over the ski area in April 2016. “Just looking, you can tell how much snow there is; how much of the snow towers are covered? We could see rocks in our lift line course.” Beartooth Basin’s parking lot is at 10,900 feet. The bottom of its two ski lifts are 1,000 feet below.

  Beartooth Basin was founded in the 1960s by three Austrian ski coaches as the Red Lodge International Ski Camp. It was only open to private groups. “The whole thing was put in to have a training area for Olympic athletes,” Justin says. It wasn’t until the late 1990s, when some of the current owners first bought into the ski area, that it was opened to the public. In 2003, the name was changed to Beartooth Basin Summer Ski Area.

  Although the ski area is only 600 acres, less than one-quar
ter the size of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort 100+ miles to the south, “you can get puckered up and it feels like you’re really getting after it,” Justin says. This is because all of the ski runs are below a big cornice. To ski them, you have to get past the cornice. “The easiest way in, it’s 30 or 40 degrees,” Justin says. “You can launch right off the cornice; then it’s 90 degrees. The terrain we offer is pretty advanced.” There isn’t a single beginner run. Neither is there a lodge. Bathrooms are port-a-potties and lift tickets and snacks are sold out of an RV. 23 miles south of Red Lodge on Hwy. 212, Beartoothbasin.com

  LOCAL LOWDOWN JUSTIN MODROO, Owner of Beartooth Basin Summer Ski Area

  Justin Modroo grew up in Billings and ski racing at Red Lodge Mountain. In the early 2000s, he competed in the World Free-Skiing Tour, which holds big mountain skiing competitions around the world. Twice Justin finished in the Top 10 overall. While he was competing, he also earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geophysics. He bought into the ski area “in about 2012,” he says. “I knew it was a good opportunity and I knew they could use the help. It’s definitely a labor of love,” Justin says. “We’re not really making any money and any money we do make we tend to throw back into equipment.”

  Austin Hart is the president of the owners’ group and Justin is the vice president. “We’re basically the operators as well,” he says. “Usually between Austin and myself, one of us is up there every day. Kurt Hallock [another owner] comes up too.” Justin says that on any given day, there are only five employees working. “Because we have such a small staff, most everyone can do multiple things. They’ll bounce around for the day, and that’s what Austin and I do too when we’re up there. We’ll go and fill one of the lifties for a while, or work the ticket booth.”