U.S. Route 212 in Montana and Wyoming
section of U.S. Numbered Highway in Montana, United States, with two parts
U.S. Route 212 (US 212) is a part of the U.S. Highway System that travels from Yellowstone National Park east to Edina, Minnesota. In Montana and Wyoming, it starts at the northeastern entrance of Yellowstone National Park near Silver Gate, Montana and extends approximately 376 miles (605 km) to the South Dakota state near Colony, Wyoming, with it crossing between the two states numerous times.
Route description
The official western terminus of US 212 is at the Northeast Entrance of Yellowstone National Park near the Wyoming–Montana state line; however, some commercially produced maps show the highway within the park itself, contiguous with Northeast Entrance Road, starting from its western end at Tower Junction on the Grand Loop. From the park, US 212 begins as the Beartooth Highway, tracing the historical route of Civil War General Philip Sheridan over the Beartooth Mountains. In his book Dateline America published in 1979, the late CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt referred to the highway as "the most beautiful drive in America". The highway travels through an eight-mile (13 km) segment in Montana, past Cooke City, to the Wyoming state line, where it passes through the state for approximately 35 miles (56 km) and crossing Beartooth Pass at an elevation of 10,974 feet (3,345 m) above sea level. US 212 crosses back into Montana and travels approximately 25 miles (40 km) to Red Lodge, which is the eastern terminus of the Beartooth Highway.
US 212 continues northeast from the Beartooth Mountains for 31 miles (50 km) to Rockvale, where it joins US 310 and the two routes share a 13-mile (21 km) concurrency to Laurel. Here US 212 joins Interstate 90 (I-90), while US 310 ends, and they travel nine miles (14 km) east to Billings. On the east side of Billings, US 87 joins I-90 and US 212 and the three routes continue 58 miles (93 km) east to Crow Agency, located within the Crow Indian Reservation.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “U.S. Route 212 in Montana and Wyoming” is section of U.S. Numbered Highway in Montana, United States, with two parts. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Route, Montana and Wyoming, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “section of U.S. Numbered Highway in Montana, United States, with two parts” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q64514529. Authority coordinates are 45.003, -110.002. None of the 4 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1979.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “U.S. Route 212 in Montana and Wyoming” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.