Beartooth Pass summit overlook
— the place the road decides to stop climbing.
Not only on a wall.
Beartooth Pass summit overlook, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The summit overlook sits near 10,947 feet, the highest paved point on US 212 and one of the highest in the northern Rockies. The pull-off looks south across the Beartooth Plateau and east down the switchbacks toward Red Lodge. Snowbanks hold into July at the edges of the lot, and the wind is constant. On a clear afternoon the line of the Absaroka Range stands a hundred miles south. The road is open only late May through mid-October; outside that window the pass belongs to the snow. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Beartooth Pass crosses the Montana–Wyoming line at 10,947 feet on US Route 212, between Red Lodge, Montana and Cooke City. It is the highest paved pass in either state. The summit overlook on the Wyoming side gives a long view south across the Beartooth Plateau and a sweeping look east down the switchbacks toward the Rock Creek drainage and Red Lodge below. The route was engineered in the 1930s under federal works programs and completed in 1936. The Forest Service manages the surrounding land within the Shoshone National Forest.
At nearly 11,000 feet the air carries about 68 percent of the oxygen at sea level, and weather on the pass turns faster than at any other point on the road. Afternoon thunderstorms build off the Absaroka Range through July and August; snow is recorded at the summit in every month of the year. The constant wind keeps the overlook cold even when the valley floor at Red Lodge sits in the eighties. Visitors stepping out of warm cars often underestimate the chill; the Forest Service recommends a layer even at midsummer.
The pass opens with the rest of the Beartooth Highway in late May and closes with the first sustained snow, usually between the second week and the end of October. Plow crews from Montana and Wyoming begin work in early May and meet near the summit. Wildflower bloom on the surrounding tundra peaks in the first two weeks of July; the willows along the small summit lakes turn copper in the first week of September. Current opening and closure status is posted by the Montana Department of Transportation and the Wyoming DOT.
