That’s one of the oddities that Montana Department of Transportation historian Jon Axline discusses in a book published today, Aug. 29, 2016 – “The Beartooth Highway: A History of America’s Most Beautiful Drive.” Published by South Carolina-based Arcadia Publishing & The History Press, the 144-page paperback retails for $21.99. And, says Axline from his Helena office, it’s the first time a book dealing with the Beartooth Highway has managed to keep its eyes on the road rather than getting sidetracked by the rugged terrain it passes through.

The 68-mile highway between Red Lodge and Cooke City in southcentral Montana is widely thought of as an engineering marvel – “the country’s highest and most novel highway – 11,000 feet high,” the Helena Independent noted in June 1936. The route was surveyed in 1927, work was begun in 1931 and the project was completed in 1936 – eighty years ago this year.

“Most of the work after 1933 was widening it and putting in guard rails. Originally it didn’t have guard rails, but they found that it scared people,” Axline told the Missoulian.

He added that what is arguably America’s most beautiful road was not marketed as such for getting it approved by Congress.

As Axline notes in his book, “Initially much of the lobbying done by Montana boosters for the road in the 1920s didn’t focus so much on adding a new gateway to Yellowstone National Park from Red Lodge as it did on developing the mineral resources of the New World Mining District outside Cooke City. Indeed, the rhetoric for the highway in Red Lodge advocated the national park gateway locally, but when lobbying in Congress for the route, it concentrated primarily on access to Cooke City and for better access to timber in the national forests – both sources of revenue for the federal government.”

But in a conversation with the Missoulian, Axline said mining traffic over that route never developed – fortunately, since that would have made for white-knuckle driving by both tourists and mine employees.

“The mining was what sold it to Congress,” Axline said. “It never really took off as a mining highway. It was always a tourist highway.”

Some of the building choices – massive stonework on some of the bridges and timber guardrails – seems to have tourists in mind.

“One of the ideas with these approach roads to the parks was to make them look more rustic. Stone and logs were a great way to do that,” Axline said – and that continues to pay off for tourists today. “It really does meld into the environment. It’s become a part of the landscape since its construction.”

As to the engineering marvel that it was, that’s true in more ways than one. It came in under budget, with a final cost of a little more than $2.5 million, or much less than the $5.4 million that transportation officials had estimated it would cost. It was finished in an amazingly short span of time. And work crews fashioned a road by simply following the stakes that marked the center line of the route surveyors had laid out, but with no complicated plans to follow.

“The road itself seems to have been built mostly without plans,” Axline said. “They made engineering decisions in the field. It seems to have been mostly a seat-of-your-pants kind of engineering that they did. They just started digging their way up to the top from one end and digging their way up to the top from the other end and following those center markers.”

And they did it without a finely tuned work force.

“People came and went pretty frequently because it was a make-work project during the Great Depression.”

There’s not even a complete record of who worked on the project, though the Montana side of the work, which was in the hands of a very professional company called Morrison-Knudsen, had better records than the work that started at the Wyoming side of the project. There, a company called McNutt & Pyle had the contract to do the work. Axline pulls no punches in his assessment of how it went: “While the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) publicized Morrison-Knudsen’s efficiency on Segment A, McNutt & Pyle’s operations on Segment B were strikingly different. Sloppy supervision, poor management decisions and amateurish employees were the hallmark of McNutt & Pyle’s experiences on the project.”

On top of that, that end of the project had nasty weather and nasty geology to deal with.

“Despite the drawbacks, the contractor soldiered on through some of the most rugged topography of the entire Beartooth Highway,” Axline writes.

Oddly, the nearly finished project still had no name in 1934, though the Billings Gazette early on led the push to name it the Beartooth Highway. The National Park Service was calling it the Cooke City Road, while Red Lodge businessmen were in the habit of calling it the Red Lodge-Cooke City Highway. In 1960 the Montana State Advertising Department, a part of the Montana State Highway Commission at the time, asked people for suggestions for a new name for the highway. Among the possibilities suggested were "Highway to the Clouds," "Highway to the Skies" and "Highway to the Heavens."

Is it really “the most beautiful drive in America,” as CBS broadcaster Charles Kuralt said it was in 1979? Axline, for one, tends to agree that it is.

“I’m sure the Going-to-the-Sun people might not agree,” he said.

In 2014, the National Park Service – with backing from the transportation departments of Wyoming and Montana – listed the Beartooth Highway on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s one of four such stretches of road in Montana that are listed, Axline said. The others are Going-to-the-Sun Road; a stretch of old Highway 91 between Helena and Great Falls; and an old segment of convict-built road in Park County.

Axline said it’s doubtful that a road such as the Beartooth Highway, or Going-to-the-Sun Road, for that matter, could be built in the 21st century. It certainly deserves the recognition it has received as a national landmark, he said in an email exchange.

“The Beartooth Highway is a tremendous accomplishment, building a road where no road existed before. It also says something about the importance of our national parks in that Congress funded the construction of it in the first place – primarily to serve tourists. Like other roads of that time, it conforms to the landscape and has since become a part of the landscape. It transformed the economies of Cooke City and Red Lodge from mining camps into, essentially, resort communities. Mostly, it is a testimonial to the men who built it. Except for the power shovels and dump trucks, it was a lot of pick and shovel work, putting unemployed men back to work during the depths of the Great Depression.”