Red Lodge is a small mountain town at the base of the Beartooth Mountains in south-central Montana, sitting at 1,700m elevation with a well-preserved main street of brick storefronts. It is the eastern gateway to Yellowstone via the Beartooth Highway — US 212 — which climbs over the 3,350m Beartooth Pass. President Franklin Roosevelt called it "the most beautiful drive in America," and the claim is hard to dispute: the road switchbacks above the treeline onto a high plateau of tundra, glacial lakes, and granite pinnacles before dropping down into Cooke City and the Yellowstone backcountry.
The pass is closed from mid-October to late May by snow. Red Lodge itself has a small ski area (Red Lodge Mountain) and is a base for hiking, mountain biking, rock climbing, and fly-fishing in the surrounding Carbon County wilderness. The town has a genuine western character and a decent selection of restaurants and bars on Broadway Avenue.