Beartooth Highway and Clark's Fork Gorge

While in Cody, we stayed in the Absaroka Bay RV park located on the east side of Cody. We have stayed in this park several times over the years and have always enjoyed it and the location. Close to town, but reasonably priced. 

Our site worked out just fine for us and was level with great hookups. We are pretty long at 42' plus the car, but this site worked fine.

The Beartooth Highway climbs very high in altitude and once we got above the tree line at some 9,800', things got pretty desolate as you can see here. While there are a few peaks higher than us, there were not many!

The Beartooth wraps between Montana and Wyoming, with the highest areas occurring right after we entered Wyoming, which fittingly, is where we started in the morning. 

 Rick was impressed with the snow and solitude up here. You can also see one of the snow poles near him and we heard that in not too many weeks, these poles will be in use!

Wow, can we see a long ways up here. There are no trees, shrubs, or anything else up here on the summit. This is classic tundra and we were very happy to have plenty of gas in the tank. Rick is in his short sleeve shirt, but was happy to get back in the car with the heated seats on!

We saw quite a bit of snow up here, and this is at the end of the summer. This snow will be here to greet the new stuff when if flies soon.

I guess seeing snow in September is always a novelty, but it is cold up here! there was also a pretty good wind blowing and Orinda refused to leave the car, so Rick had to use the camera self timer to capture this "great" shot.

No wonder it is cold! We are at almost 11,000' above sea level here. Heck, if we were in an aircraft, we would be on oxygen by now! We have climbed well over a mile since leaving Red Lodge, which is at 5,550 feet itself. 

 Leaving the Beartooth, we took the adjoining Chief Joseph Highway back toward Cody. As we zipped along, all of a sudden we crossed this bridge and deep gorge. We quickly stopped and took a close look at Clarks' Fork River Gorge, which we learned was over 1,000' deep. This is quite a surprise since you do not see any real indication of this until you cross the bridge.

All in all, this is a great day's drive and one of the best we have ever taken. Well worth the trip if you are in the Cody, WY area.