The Big, Bad Beartooth
Folks for those of you adventurers I’m going to give you a photo chronicle of one of the hippest, coolest places to car accessibly ski anywhere on the planet. That place is the Beartooth Pass in Red Lodge, Montana. It opens on Memorial Day but check with MDOT at (800) 226-7623 because two feet of powder have been known to grace this area even in June.
About a 10 minute drive south of town the road bends upward finally cresting at just less than 11,000 feet of altitude at the West summit. It is real big vertical considering that you get to climb most of it in a car and access dozens of different big mountain lines (check out the photos). There are even places like the saddle approach down in to Gardiner head wall that are easily skiable by a skier of intermediate ability but make no mistake, most of this is big mountain expert terrain. If you can’t ski Corbett’s at Jackson, the Couloir at Big Sky, or Great Scott at Snowbird then you probably should not be skiing most of this terrain.
We headed out of town to a bluebird day and marveled at our good fortune as we headed for the drop-off point. It is best to bring two vehicles so you can leave one at the bottom of Glacier Lake Road for the big ski out. When you get on Glacier about 5 miles up is a rock about the size of a small hotel; leave your car here. Orient yourself to the line you will take by looking up and getting some large scale reference points you can use in the Valley to orient yourself from above because you’ll need them later in the day.
We all stayed at this really cool new development called The Spires at Red Lodge the night before and went for a big walk on their trail system marveling at the views of the high peaks to the west. We were amazed by just how affordable Red Lodge Montana real estate is as they were selling complete cottages for under $200,000. We didn’t think there was a ski town anywhere where anything left that was this affordable.
With the pick-up vehicle left behind down at the base of Reefer Ridge we begin the half hour climb around dozens of switchbacks to the west summit. The views up the Glacier Lake Valley are just phenomenal.
We pass the climb out (about 500 vertical feet) from Gardiner Headwall near the top of the west summit. Gardiner is about 1,000 vertical feet at anywhere from 35 degrees to 45 degrees of pitch depending upon which side of the head wall you select to ski. If it is spring corn then no problem but always be on the lookout for wet slides, they don’t go to fast but they are hard to get out of and potentially dangerous. Gardiner gets skied enough that the likelihood is less but you always want to stay alert.
Gardiner is awesome corn on our decent so we take the south (steep) side. At the end of our hike out we thumb back up to the car and begin our trek out Reefer Ridge following lunch. There are dozens of lines down to the Glacier Lake Road and there are dozens of ways to get trapped, or cliffed out only to find yourself hiking back out of that which you just skied. When you catch the right line it is pure heaven.
After a few misfires we found a great line that took us almost to our drop point. I’ll let the photo of this line speak the thousand words, but in a word it was AWESOME. Back into the rig we head up to pick-up the rig on the summit so we can set ourselves up to ski yet another big line called the Rock Creek headwall.
The headwall was about the size of most ski areas and dropped straight down to the third to last switchback on the Pass. Cold PBR’s were waiting for us and on the trip back we just sat there in stunned silence because we hadn’t seen a sole all day long accept for our first descent.