Weekend Getaway: Part II

Now that another week has come and gone, I suppose I should post another segment from our weekend getaway.

After leaving Yellowstone we stayed the night in Cooke City. When we awoke in the morning we were able to see a little more of our surroundings:

We also discovered a cute little black cat that wandered into our room every time we opened the door. He just came in and made himself right at home! Very friendly, but we kept putting him back out nonetheless. After we checked out of our room we decided to check out the town of Cooke City. There's not much there other than hotels, bars, and a few coffee shops. This is about it:

We did stop at this little coffee shop, though, and decided that they have really good caramel mochas. That's a good way to start off any day.

We drove up the Beartooth Pass. It was fairly strange to be in the middle of June and find so much snow around. There were plenty of other people that were enjoying it, though.

The weirdest part had to be driving through snow drifts on both sides of the road that were taller than our car:

Unfortunately, as we neared the top of the pass we learned that the road was not completely open due to snow, so we had to turn around and take another way. We drove through some beautiful scenery along the way, though, and I'm glad we went that way. The rock formations were very cool and there were some crazy sharp mountain peaks. You could definitely see that it was a glacially formed area and, as I said, it was beautiful to drive through.

As we rounded a corner on this twisty, curvy road, we came to a bridge and saw that it crossed a gorge. Not just a little gorge, either, but a really deep one, with rock cliff walls and a tiny river (at least tiny from where we were!) at the bottom. We stopped there and got out for a bit to look around, but the pictures we took could in no way do justice to the sight. It was amazing. You can sort of see the gorge running up the center of this picture (though not the bridge):

And here you can see the gorge drop off under the bridge, but you can't even see halfway down the rock cliffs. It was deep! (And yes, for those concerned, there was a giant fence to keep people from falling down and we did stay on our side of it. =D )

Along the way, we saw a few not-so-natural spectacles, too. We drove through a lot of podunk MT on this trip, including the town of Edelweiss (population 3)...

and a quick drive through the town of Belfry (yes, their school mascot is the Bats... because they apparently have bats in the belfry)...

(But really... would you want to walk under this creepy looking sculpture every time you went to school? Me either.)

And as we joined up with the highway on our way to Billings, we stumbled out of nowhere land and into... a ferris wheel? Oh, and a giant cowboy with a rifle. I felt like I was on Route 66.

And though we were a couple hours late due to the Beartooth Pass being closed, we eventually made it to Billings for Father's Day with Leif's family. But that is part III of our Weekend Getaway, so you'll have to wait for that story a bit later. (Though hopefully not as long as you had to wait for part II! I'm hoping to get it up later today if I can!)