Day 118 - Beartooth Scenic Byway & Battle of Little Bighorn, MT

As we packed up camp this morning, we both agreed that we had really enjoyed camping at Yellowstone and that being in one place for 3 nights was a welcome break from the hard work that comes with putting the tent up and down when you're only camping for 1 night.

We left the campsite and headed along Dunraven Pass towards Tower-Roosevelt where we picked up the park road through the Lamar Valley on the Northeast. I was really looking forward to traveling through this valley as it is the best place to spot wolves. All the wolves in Yellowstone were wiped out by hunters and the park authorities themselves by 1926 but after decades of lobbying, wolves were finally reintroduced in 1995. Today there are just over 100 wolves but the reintroduction of wolves and even having wolves in the park today is a hugely controversial subject. There were quite a few books in the gift shop explaining what happened during the reintroduction including the story of 06, apparently the most famous wolf in the World who was shot by a trophy hunter just outside of Yellowstone. I only had time to quickly flick through these books (whilst Lee was distracted in the astronomy section) but when we get home, I would like to sit down and read some of them.

We didn't see any wolves in Lamar Valley but we were driving through and it was the morning. If we had the time, we'd probably come for the day, set up a couple of chairs and just watch the animals in the valley through some binoculars.

We did find all the female bison and their calves, huge herds of bison which given the scale of the landscape, looked like small speckled dots in the background. This part of the park reminded most of the BBC documentary Yellowstone, I need to re-watch it to see if this is the park of the park where they filmed.

We exited the park at he Northeast Entrance and then picked up the Beartooth Scenic Byway. We hadn't originally planned to go this route but on the map it looked like a scenic route and we prefer the scenic routes to the boring ones so we thought we would give it a go.

Beartooth Scenic Byway is amazing, the best road we have traveled on during on time in the US. It is 68 miles long and runs between Yellowstone in Wyoming and the town of Red Lodge in Montana. For a long time, it feels like you are climbing up a mountain range, each turn provides a view of a new vista containing lakes, mountains, forests, tundra, its just breathtaking. At the top of the mountain, you feel like you are on top of the world as you travel along the Beartooth Pass. There are huge piles of snow here, apparently it can even snow here in summer and it is common for the road to be closed due to poor road conditions or strong winds, we were lucky and had some good weather during our drive. At the end of the pass, we then had to head back down to the valley floor. We went from 8000ft to 5000ft in 12 miles using tight switchbacks on what felt like the face of a canyon. Once in the valley, its amazing to look up and see where we had come from. We've done a number of drives similar to this including the drive up the Rocky Mountains but this one was incredible.

We reached the town of Red Lodge, a busy tourist town with a ski resort close by. We decided not to stop as we had stopped so many times on the drive here and instead headed onto our next stop, the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. I had studied this battle at school so I knew a little about the history but I was interested to see how the monument described the battle and whether it favoured one side over the other.

The Battle of Little Bighorn was one of the Native Americans last efforts to preserve their way of life. Thousands of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors joined forces to do battle with the US Army. It was a victory for the Native Americans with 263 US soldiers including Colonel Custer who died fighting. It was a short-lived victory as it then led to the Wounded Knee Massacre where large numbers of men, women and children Native Americans were killed and to the end of the resistance to the US government.

The battlefield used to be known as Custer Battlefield National Monument and was preserved to protect the graves of the US soldiers but in 1991 the name was changed to Little Bighorn Battlefield by George Bush and since then, a more rounded view of the battle has been preserved including headstones added for Native American soldiers (red to contrast the white US army ones) and an Indian Memorial added.

We took the driving tour around the battlefield. As you reached an information station you dialed a number, entered a code and then listened to people explaining what happened at this point. The quality of the audio wasn't great but the idea was fantastic, I wish we had this for other parks.

The landscape at the battlefield is dotted with headstones marking where soldiers and warriors fell, the biggest concentration and where Custer is located is near the visitors center and marks where he took his 'last stand'.

We didn't realise that the Battlefield is also the location of a national cemetery where military personnel who were lost in service are buried and remembered.

We left the battlefield and headed to our motel for the night in a small local town called Hardin. The motel was family run, our room looked like it had been recently renovated and the other guests (including a fellow English couple) where all friendly. There were only a couple of places in town for food so we took the advice of the motel owner and headed to Four Aces Bar and Lounge for fried chicken. We love staying in these small countryside towns, they are all so different, the residents are friendly and its great to experience a side of America that most people don't get the opportunity to see.