The Red Lodge Country

The board's open book on Beartooth Butte stands across the line in Wyoming, beside the Beartooth Highway. Its best-known page is a channel of Early Devonian rock, about 2,500 feet wide and 250 feet thick, laid down in an estuary some 400 million years ago. William Bryant began describing its armored fishes in 1932, and the same beds hold eurypterids and the most extensive Early Devonian plant fossils in western North America. A Cal Poly Humboldt dig in 2017 recovered the formation's first fish preserved in three dimensions.

What the plaque says

The Red Lodge Country According to tradition, a band of Crow Indians left the main tribe and moved west into the foothills of the Beartooth Range many years ago. They painted their council tepee with red-clay and this old-time artistry resulted in the name Red Lodge. This region is a bonanza for scientists. It is highly fossil- ized and Nature has opened a book on Beartooth Butte covering about a quarter of a billion years of geological history. It makes pretty snappy reading for parties interested in some of the ologies-palaeontology for example. Some students opine that prehistoric men existed here several million years earlier than heretofore believed. Personally we don't know, but if there were people prowling around that long ago, of course they would pick Montana as the best place to live.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Smith Mine — 3.0 mi
  Rusting buildings beside the highway, all that is left of the mine where Montana's worst coal disaster emptied a valley.
• Beartooth Highway — 12 mi
  A road over the top of the world, built because a coal town's mines closed and it needed tourists instead.

More markers nearby

• Red Lodge — steps away
• The Beartooth Plateau — steps away
• Liver-Eating Johnston's Cabin — 1.2 mi
• The Smith Mine Disaster — 3.1 mi