East Rosebud Road reopens after speedy construction effort

BILLINGS – At a blistering pace, a new temporary road and bridge have been constructed, again allowing public vehicle access into East Rosebud Lake beginning Friday.

Last June, a record-setting flood washed out the old structures, making access to cabins, trails and campsites walk-in only, with the exception of those who could afford a helicopter ride.

The Forest Service opened the 3-mile route into a much-loved portion of the Beartooth Mountains with limitations. These include no camp trailers or stock trailers, no stopping or pulling off to the side of the road. High-clearance vehicles are recommended. Delays could occur as construction continues.

With the road’s reopening, hikers and backpackers will have easier access to trails that access Granite Peak, the state’s highest mountain, and Sylvan Lake – a golden trout fishery.

Still under repair is the popular Cooke City Trail, also known as The Beaten Path. Sections of the trail were washed out by the flood and need to be reconstructed. A realignment of the trail to Elk Lake should be finished this month. About 2 miles of the trail from Elk to Rimrock Lake also needs work, possibly next summer. The Five-Mile bridge at Rimrock Lake was blasted downstream by the flood. An engineering survey was conducted last week. It will have to be specially designed to meet wilderness criteria. It could be two years before it’s installed.

“We still get a lot of calls from people who want to hike The Beaten Path, and then they get a little more detail and they put it on hold,” said Allie Wood, the district’s wilderness and trails manager. “I’m suspecting once that bridge and road opens, we’ll have a huge influx of users in this drainage.”

The 14-site East Rosebud Lake campground will also reopen, although no water will be immediately available.

The route into the drainage is the last of five main roads on the Beartooth Ranger District to be repaired and reopened following flood damage caused in 2022. Wiped out in the flood were a dozen forest road bridges and about 16 trail bridges, along with many others requiring repair. Still on the to-do list in the Yellowstone Ranger District is the Sixmile Road in Paradise Valley, where a three-quarters-of-a-mile reroute is being considered.

“It’s been a year of craziness,” said Grant Morrison, Beartooth District engineer during a tour of the East Rosebud on Tuesday. “That’s the only way to describe it.”

His T-shirt proudly proclaimed him an “Enginerd.”

Even though he helped make the road and bridge work happen, Morrison can hardly believe the progress that’s been made in such a short amount of time. He first viewed the damage from a helicopter only a week after the floodwaters scoured the valley down to its gray stone bones last June.

“A boulder field was all that was left of the road,” he said. “It truly is amazing what happened here. This went from an 80-foot bridge with a 40-foot channel to a 300-foot-wide swath of destruction. The scale was amazing.”

“It didn’t take very long to realize we we’re not building the road where it was,” he added.

Kevin Traynor, whose company Acrow manufactured the temporary bridge, said when he first arrived in May along the raging East Boulder Creek, the area resembled a moonscape.

“The rock distribution around here is unbelievable,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve seen anything approaching the size of the boulders that river moved. It’s incredible.”

Cabin owners John and Nancy Bridenbaugh hooted and raised their arms in celebration as they crossed the newly installed steel bridge. It was slid on heavy-duty rollers across the creek last week, already fully assembled. The Bridenbaughs had hiked in twice in July to check on their family’s cabin, originally built by John’s grandfather.

“Honestly, we’re super impressed with the amount of work done,” John said. “It’s gone a lot faster than we thought it would.”

The couple had planned to visit from their California home last year, arriving the day after the flood washed out the bridge and road, blocking their entrance. Cabin owners trapped at the lake were helicoptered out by the National Guard on short notice. A month later, they paid to have their vehicles flown out.

Other cabin owners who have hiked in to the lake either praised the work of excavator operator Gary Wood, or expressed dismay at the swath the new road cuts across the previously undisturbed mountainside meadows and forest.

Wood has been working 12- to 16-hour days to help carve out the new route for his employer, Libby, Montana-based Thompson Contracting. Despite the huge boulders that had to be relocated for the new road, the work that made the biggest impression on him is when they used heavy equipment to push the already assembled 160-foot, 100-ton bridge across East Rosebud Creek on rollers.

“You don’t get to push a bridge across with a dozer every day,” he said.

Designed like the Bailey Bridges, prefabricated truss bridges used in World War II to launch assaults, the galvanized steel structure is built to last 100 years. Assembled in 10-foot sections, it will eventually be disassembled for possible use elsewhere in the region. A similar 80-foot bridge was installed along the West Fork Rock Creek Road near Red Lodge.

“It’s kind of like an erector set that you can build to suit whatever gap you need to cross,” Traynor said.

It took the construction crew about 1½ weeks to assemble the pieces.

“It’s sort of like Ikea, follow the steps,” Traynor said of the ready-to-assemble furniture, although the bridge has a 2-inch thick instruction manual.

Set on rollers, the structure glides so easily that it has to be chained and held back to ensure it doesn’t roll too quickly.

In the meantime, Morrison will design a new permanent bridge to meet all of the environmental requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. The documents will include time for the public to comment.

The same goes for the road. Morrison will draft plans for a permanent route that meets Forest Service standards for grade and width.

The temporary road and bridge project for the East Rosebud cost around $2 million. To design and construct the permanent features will cost another $2 million to $3 million, Morrison estimated.

“We tried to plan ahead, but there’s only a certain amount we can do,” he said.

Studies of aerial images taken of the canyon revealed evidence of a previous flood of a similar magnitude.

“From before the flood, there’s actually a delineation really close to the same boundary of the flood,” Morrison said. “It was just a vegetation-type difference. So, chances are, and it might have been a thousand years ago or more, but something like this happened before and it claimed those same boundaries. But you couldn’t see that down on the ground. It was all overgrown.”