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About Tippet Rise
The Ecosystem of Tippet Rise
ippet Rise is at the north end of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, some 22.6 million acres acting as a single unit around the immense caldera of the park. Montana science writer David Quammen put together a wonderful book on this in 2016 called Yellowstone, along with the photographers of National Geographic, who spent a year in the park.
Tippet Rise is buffered on the west and north by the Beartooth Mountains, rising to the highest summits in Montana. This volcanism is forced to travel elsewhere such as up the Madison and Gallatin river valleys farther west, where Quake Lake, 6 miles long and 190 feet deep, was created in less than a month by an 80 million-ton landslide, which dammed the Madison River, all of it stemming from a seismic tremblor. Red Lodge is a small ski and mountain town at the lesser known fifth entrance to Yellowstone. From Red Lodge you wind upwards through the many switchbacks
of the Beartooth Highway to a succession of high tundra plateaus on top of the world, exposed to sudden squalls, summer blizzards, temperature drops—all the exhilarating benefits of the alpine world. This is the most easily accessed high mountain wilderness and the largest true high elevation plateau in the United States, yet it is uncrowded.
Millions of people descend on Yellowstone in
the summer, but few discover the neighboring Beartooths, a million acres of Gothic spires set among hundreds of large alpine tarns, lakes
formed by snowmelt from the glaciers. Unlike
similar high mountain environments in Europe, the Andes, and the Himalayas, this unique area can be driven through. Cars can be used to access mountain bases. The highway was built in the 1930s, opening to the public in 1936. When Charles Kuralt drove the Beartooth Highway for his “On the Road” segment for CBS, he called it the most beautiful road in Amer- ica. Some years, 50-foot walls of snow enclose the road immediately after it is plowed in late May, to be replaced by rolling fields of wildflowers in summer. As the snow melts in July, trails into high mountain meadows open. Benign fall weather continues until early October, when sudden blizzards close the area until next May.
The common explanation of the name Beartooth hangs on the spire hidden among massifs just
north of the highway’s summit pass. Just as impres- sive are the vertically tilted beds of Bighorn dolomite, Jefferson limestone, and Madison limestone that announce the Beartooths from the plains. Pinched upwards by the Laramide uplift some 70 million years