Beartooth Highway Closed For Winter 2022-23 Season

Winter is not far away and that means some popular travel destinations are shutting down until next spring.

US Highway 212 over the Beartooth Pass in Northwest Wyoming, is now closed for the upcoming winter season.

The closure area is between 9.4 miles east of the intersection of US Highway 212 and Wyoming State Highway 296, to about 12 miles southwest of Red Lodge, Montana.

That section of highway gets up to almost 11,000 feet above sea level.

Too much snow combined with too little traffic, makes snow plowing efforts on the highway impractical, hence the highway is closed.

There wasn’t as much traffic on the highway this year compared to previous years for 2 reasons.

The first was because of road construction which caused night-time closures of the highway throughout the summer.

Then there was the snowmelt and flooding that damaged at least 6 areas of the highway on the Montana side in June, and the highway had to be closed for about 1 month for repairs.

While that was going on, the Wyoming side of the highway was reopened up to the Beartooth Area Ski Hill, which is about 3 miles south of the Wyoming-Montana border.

The highway normally reopens to motor vehicle traffic around Memorial Day.