Montana road trip

[meierlde]

The Bear Tooth Pass outside of Red Lodge has spectacular scenery and will take you towards Yellowstone if you go far enough.

If you dont go to Yellowstone then take the Chief Joseph Highway (296) down to Wyo 120 north again to mt
and then up to Belfry mt, and back to Redlodge.

 

[audreyh1]

OP are you driving from WA?

 

[Chuckanut]

OP are you driving from WA?

Yes, WA the state. Not D.C.

 

[audreyh1]

Yes, WA the state. Not D.C.

Right, I definitely meant the state.

 

[audreyh1]

I thought the drive from Missoula to Spokane across Idaho on I-90 was spectacular! I’m sure you’ve done it many times.

 

[Chuckanut]

Right off I90 is Wallace Idaho where you can stop to see an old mining town that is slowly making a tourism comeback due to its wonderful setting. There’s a nice brew pub there, and lots of old stairs to climb from street to street. And fill up the car there also (unless it’s an EV) before you hit Washington. Thanks to our carbon tax we now have some of the most expensive gasoline in the country. For a while it was more expensive than California, but those rascally Californians fought back and managed to take the #1 spot after only a month or two.

Now back to Montana. I appreciate all the tips, especially for SouthWest Montana.

 

[Pluperfect]

I suppose if you wanted to drive right up next to the pile of ringing rocks you might need 4wd. We drove to within a 1/4 mile with a 40’ motor home pulling a vehicle. It was an easy walk to the site.

I heartily second the suggestion of Ringing Rocks.

We took our own hammer, but I have a photo of the sign for Ringing Rocks, and there are three hammers people had left there. And you can use smaller rocks to play the rocks for a different tone.

We drove a BMW M-Coupe up there--definitely not a high-clearance vehicle. The time stamps on the photos indicate it took us about 15 minutes to walk from where we parked the car to the rocks.

 

[Pluperfect]

At Caras Park in downtown Missoula, there's a standing wave in the river that people surf on.

In the residential neighborhoods of Missoula, most of the intersections are unprotected--no stop or yield signs. Word is that when college students arrive in the Fall, they're unaccustomed to unprotected intersections and mayhem ensues.

Have you ridden the Route of the Hiawatha rails-to-trails trail? It's near Wallace, Idaho, which you said you'd been to.

We had our own bikes, but you can rent them. And you can get a bus from the bottom to the top. We rode both ways, downhill first and then a slight constant grind back up.

You probably have to make all kinds of reservations these days. We did it on the last day of the season about 10 years ago and just showed up and it was rainy and kind of cold but I still loved it. We left the motorhome in Haugan and drove over, and it turns out we'd crossed into a different time zone without realizing it, which doesn't matter unless you're wanting to take one of the buses.

I also second the recommendation of Little Bighorn. It's the only place I've ever been to that I can actually see what they show on the map--where everybody was at certain points in time, etc. It's really well done.