Many people have heard of the Beartooth Highway, advertised by the Northern Pacific as the Red Lodge High Road, which connects Red Lodge with Cooke City and the northeast entrance to Yellowstone. Roving reporter Charles Kuralt called it “the most beautiful road in America,” and he wasn’t far wrong.
Click image to download a 3.8-MB PDF of this brochure.
Not so famous but almost as spectacular is Chief Joseph Pass, which connects Cody to Cooke City and overlooks Sunlight Basin, a huge valley surround by the Shoshone National Forest. Of all the intriguing lands that surround Yellowstone, Sunlight is my favorite, so I was pleased to find this 1950 brochure inviting travelers to “add a day to Yellowstone trips for Sunlight Basin,” the “Shangri-la of Wyoming.”
Unfortunately, it is difficult to plan a trip to Yellowstone via both the Beartooth Highway and Sunlight since doing so misses Yellowstone itself. The tours in this brochure mostly start in Billings and take a Gray Line bus over Beartooth and Chief Joseph passes and then to Cody, entering Yellowstone from there. This detour added a day and about $16 (about $140 in today’s money) to a trip to Yellowstone, but for all the effort travelers spend only about 90 minutes sitting on a bus seat as it goes through Sunlight Basin. Presumably, the bus stopped at one or more of several overlooks.
While Sunlight would be a spectacular find anywhere else, it pales in comparison to Yellowstone, so would not be the most memorable part of a trip. Anyone who has never been to Yellowstone should not give up a day in a geyser basin to see Sunlight. However, someone who has been to Yellowstone a couple of times and wants to see something new on a return trip would find Sunlight fascinating, and NP probably directed this brochure to people like that.