How Red Lodge earned the score

Let us meet Red Lodge, Montana

Most towns are named for what they make. Red Lodge is named for something older than the town. The Crow people who wintered along Rock Creek marked their council lodge with red clay, and the name stuck to the valley before a single mine shaft went down. What went down, starting in 1887, was coal. The Rocky Fork Coal Company opened the first mine that year, and within four years, by 1891, more than 400 immigrant miners were pulling roughly 100 tons of coal a day out of the hills southwest of the Beartooth Mountains.

The coal is gone now. What it left behind is the thing Red Lodge still lives on: a compact, unusually intact downtown at 5,568 feet, and a road out the south end of it that a CBS correspondent once called the most beautiful drive in America. Red Lodge is the county seat of Carbon County, and in the 2020 census it counted 2,257 residents. In summer that number effectively doubles, because the town sits at the bottom of the Beartooth Highway, and in the warm months a large share of everyone driving toward Yellowstone by the scenic route passes through its single main drag.

How coal built the Main Street

The mines did two things for Red Lodge that outlasted the mines themselves. First, they built a real downtown. Broadway Avenue filled in with brick between roughly 1893 and 1910, a run of Classical Revival, Romanesque, and Gothic commercial fronts substantial enough that the corridor from 8th to 13th Street is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Red Lodge Commercial Historic District. The town holds a second National Register district too, the residential Hi Bug neighborhood, where the mine managers and merchants built the houses that the miners could see but not afford.

Second, the mines made Red Lodge one of the most ethnically layered small towns in the northern Rockies. The coal work drew Finns, Scots, Irish, Italians, and Slavs, and the town sorted itself into neighborhoods that carried those names: a Little Italy, a Finn Town, a Slavic end. Each group kept its own language, church, and hall. That is the raw material that later became the town’s signature event, but in the mining decades it was simply how people lived, near the ones who spoke the same way.

The peak came early. Around 1915 the town held roughly 6,000 people, several times what it holds today. Then the coal market turned. Production fell after World War I, and the mines around Red Lodge closed by 1932. The valley kept mining a little longer to the east, at Bearcreek, and that is where the darkest chapter falls. On February 27, 1943, an explosion tore through the Smith Mine No. 3 between Bearcreek and Washoe. Of the 77 men underground that day, three came out alive, and one rescue worker died afterward. Seventy-four men were killed. It remains the worst coal mining disaster in Montana history, and its memorials sit in the cemeteries at Bearcreek and Red Lodge. Any honest account of this town starts there, because the tourism economy that followed was, in part, what a coal town does when the coal is finished with it.

That is the pivot most one-industry towns never make. When the extraction economy leaves, a lot of places simply shrink and keep shrinking, their downtowns emptying one storefront at a time until the brick is a museum of what used to be. Red Lodge had two advantages that made a second act possible. It had a downtown solid enough to be worth saving, built during the boom years when there was money to build in stone. And it sat in front of some of the most dramatic terrain in the lower 48, terrain that in the automobile age would turn out to be worth more than the coal ever was. The town did not plan this. It simply happened to be standing at the right trailhead when the country started driving for pleasure.

Finding the thing: the road and the festival

Two things saved Red Lodge from becoming a ghost. One was federal, and it came in 1936. The other was homegrown, and it came in 1950.

The Beartooth Highway opened on June 14, 1936, a 68-mile stretch of what is now U.S. Route 212 running from Red Lodge to the northeast entrance of Yellowstone National Park. It is not an ordinary mountain road. It climbs by switchback to Beartooth Pass at 10,947 feet on the Wyoming side, threads past a wall of peaks that top 12,000 feet, and sits under enough snow that it is only open roughly from mid-May to mid-October. In 1994, CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt, who had spent years crossing the country by RV looking for the extraordinary, named it the most beautiful drive in America. The label stuck. Today the route carries the federal designation of an All-American Road, the highest tier of National Scenic Byway, and for Red Lodge it functions as both the main attraction and the main street of a much larger territory. The town is Mile Zero.

The second rescue was the Festival of Nations. After the mines closed, the old ethnic neighborhoods had no economic reason to stay divided, and the tensions that had kept Finns, Italians, and Slavs in separate corners of town began to feel like a waste of a shared history. Community leaders built the Veterans Memorial Civic Center, dedicated in 1950, and in 1951 it became home to a festival that turned the town’s fractured heritage into a single celebration. The Festival of Nations, still running every August, spends several days on the music, dance, costume, and food of the nationalities that dug the coal. It is one of the clearest examples in this study of a town taking the specific, unglamorous facts of its past and building an annual reason to visit out of them.

What Red Lodge built with it

The town did not stop at a road and a festival. Over the second half of the twentieth century it stacked reasons to come across the calendar, which is the hardest problem a seasonal town has to solve. Red Lodge Mountain, the ski area just west of town, gave it a winter. The mountain runs to a summit of 9,413 feet and can move about 11,000 skiers an hour up its lifts, and it turned the coldest, emptiest months into a second, smaller season. The same operation added a golf course and a ski school, the ordinary machinery of a resort town spreading its risk across more of the year.

Summer, though, is still the engine, and summer is stacked deep. Every Fourth of July weekend the town hosts the Home of Champions Rodeo, a professional rodeo that has run since the 1920s and fills the grandstands for three days of roping and riding, with a noon parade down Broadway. The Yellowstone Wildlife Sanctuary on the edge of town gives visitors a close look at the rescued bears, mountain lions, wolves, foxes, and raptors of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, animals that cannot be released back into the wild. Add the Festival of Nations in August, the historic Broadway storefronts full of shops and restaurants, and the fact that the town is the launch point for the Beartooth, and you have a place that punches far above 2,257 residents.

The town has also worked at this deliberately. In 2006 Red Lodge was chosen as a pilot community in the first year of Montana’s Main Street program, a formal effort to keep the historic downtown economically alive rather than merely photogenic. That is worth noting, because plenty of towns have a pretty old main street and let it drift into antique shops and vacancy. Red Lodge treated its downtown as working infrastructure, the retail and dining floor of the whole Beartooth economy, and kept it open past six.

The number, and the fragility under it

Red Lodge earns a Visitor Impact Score of 92, a Destination Leader, and an A- on the online tier. That is a high score, and it is honestly earned. The uniqueness of the anchor is close to the ceiling. There is only one Beartooth Highway, and the town owns its northern gate outright. The downtown is intact, historic, and genuinely used. Lodging and stay signals are strong for a town this size, because a gateway town has to sleep its visitors. What holds the composite just under the very top is not a weakness of assets but a structural fact of the place, and it showed itself with brutal clarity in June 2022.

That month, sudden snowmelt turned Rock Creek into a wall of water that ran through Red Lodge, swamping bridges, homes, and businesses, and cutting off the nearest access to Yellowstone. The Beartooth Highway washed out in six places, in spots leaving ruts described as up to 100 feet deep. The pass closed at the height of the season. Reporting from the weeks that followed put the damage in plain numbers: hotel business in the area fell by 30 to 60 percent, and in Cooke City, the tiny town at the far end of the road, roughly 80 percent of normal summer business simply vanished. One operator described a friend with five area restaurants who lost about $100,000 in two weeks. The Beartooth reopened in stages later that summer, and Red Lodge, as the local phrase went, was back open for business. But the flood was a live demonstration of the score’s one caution: a town whose supreme asset is a seasonal scenic road is a town whose economy is exactly as reliable as that road and that season.

What is next

The work ahead for Red Lodge is the work of every gateway town that scores this well: widen the calendar and lower the dependence on a single corridor. The ski mountain, the festivals, the rodeo, and the sanctuary are all bets on the shoulder seasons and the months when the pass is shut. The reconstruction of the Beartooth after 2022, still underway and not without local debate about how it is being rebuilt, is a chance to make the lifeline more durable. None of that changes the core identity. Red Lodge is, and will remain, the town at the bottom of the most beautiful drive in America. The question the score keeps asking is whether a place can turn a supremely seasonal gift into a year-round living, and Red Lodge has spent seventy years answering yes, one festival and one winter at a time.

For a very different route to the same lesson, that a specific, ownable attraction can pull visitors and dollars into a small town, see our study of Thomas Dambo’s trolls in Detroit Lakes and the boost they gave that community’s tourism and economy.