Red Lodge, Montana
The day was supposed to be about photographing fall landscapes—the changing colors, sunlight on the mountains and hopefully some good views across the valleys. Instead, it had rained most of the night and by morning didn’t look like it was going to let up very much. There was a possible window later in the afternoon, but even then the forecast showed heavy cloud cover. After nearly two weeks of weather like this, I decided I had waited long enough and drove over to Rx Coffee in Livingston before leaving town.
I stayed at Rx Coffee for about an hour, drinking coffee, checking my itinerary and figuring out what I was going to do next. I also met one of the owners and we talked for quite a while about the shop. She had worked there for the previous owner, and when he retired, her family bought the business. They have been running it for about eight years now, and she said it has continued to grow. A couple of years ago, Starbucks opened a store downtown and she admitted they were worried it might hurt their business. Instead, Rx apparently did even better. Starbucks lasted four months and closed.
Her daughter was working behind the counter and gave us a wave while we were talking. Her husband had already stopped in for his morning coffee before heading off to work at another business—I think she said it involved welding. They had also added a coffee truck that they take to events, and she pointed out a newspaper article on the wall about the business. After spending several days in Livingston, Rx had become one of those places where everything simply seemed to work. The coffee was good, the staff paid attention and people actually seemed happy to be there.
I didn’t fully appreciate how unusual that was until I started the rest of my morning. I had two documents that needed to be printed, notarized and mailed overseas, and I figured the entire process would take about an hour. I arrived at the UPS Store shortly after it opened at 8:30 and printed the documents. They offered notary services, which should have made things easy, except the notary wasn’t coming in until 9:30. That seemed reasonable enough, so I waited. Nine-thirty came and went, and she eventually arrived around 10:30.
Once the documents were notarized, I went to the post office to send them by registered mail. The clerk working the counter didn’t know how to send a registered letter overseas, so I was told the person who did know would be in at 11:30. I came back at 11:30, but she wasn’t there either. She finally arrived sometime after noon and, once she appeared, knew exactly what to do and had the letter taken care of almost immediately. What I thought would take an hour had now consumed most of the morning, and Livingston was beginning to feel like a town where appointment times were treated more as general suggestions.
By then it was lunchtime, so I walked over to the Engine Room, which was conveniently next to the post office. I ordered a sandwich and was told it would take about 35 minutes. That seemed like plenty of time to go back to the van, get my laptop and return. As it turned out, I could probably have driven to Bozeman, bought a sandwich and come back. The food finally arrived almost an hour after I ordered it.
By then I was thinking again about Rx Coffee. They could make good coffee, serve a room full of people, carry on conversations with customers and somehow keep everything moving. Apparently I had started the day at Livingston’s center of logistical excellence and spent the rest of the morning watching the standard gradually decline. The sandwich at the Engine Room was good, but enormous, so I ate about half of it and took the rest with me.
My next destination was Red Lodge. The note in my itinerary read, Drive to Red Lodge at an unhurried pace. The objective is to be positioned for whichever day gives you the best Beartooth weather. That was exactly the plan. Red Lodge sits at the northern end of the Beartooth Highway, which climbs into the Beartooth Mountains before continuing toward Yellowstone. The highway itself was one of the reasons I had come this way. I was hoping for fall color, mountain scenery and, after the weather I had been having, perhaps even some sunlight.
Red Lodge, Montana
I took plenty of breaks along the way and arrived in Red Lodge just before 5:00. For the first time in what seemed like forever, I could see patches of blue sky. I had been driving beneath gray clouds and intermittent rain for much of the previous two weeks, so seeing actual sunlight breaking through ahead of me was enough to improve my mood considerably. I parked near downtown and started walking.
I spent the next three and a half hours wandering up and down Broadway and the surrounding streets, going into shops and photographing just about anything that caught my attention. Red Lodge has the look of a mountain town that long ago figured out people were willing to travel there. There were restaurants, cafés, bars, outdoor shops and an astonishing number of real-estate offices. For a town this size, they seemed to be everywhere, which made it pretty clear that there was no shortage of people arriving in Montana, looking at the mountains and deciding they wanted to own a piece of it.
I wasn’t particularly interested in photographing Red Lodge as a collection of tourist attractions. I was more interested in the town itself—the old storefronts, the signs, the bits of street art, the people walking by and the way the buildings fit together. Some of the storefronts were beautifully restored, while others still showed their age. There was the McCampbell Building with its large arched windows, the old Buses of Yellowstone building with two vintage gasoline pumps still standing out front, the local Elks Lodge with its stone columns, and the bright red Red Lodge Trolley sitting along Broadway.
I kept finding smaller things as I walked. A fly shop occupied a weathered pale-green building that looked as though it had been repainted a dozen times. The Roman Theatre sign still hung above the street, and there were neon signs in windows, bright red benches and old brick walls that had accumulated decades of wear. One of my favorite discoveries was a badly faded Coca-Cola advertisement painted on an old wall. Most of the color had disappeared and parts of the lettering were almost gone, but enough remained to see what it had once been. I found that much more interesting than a freshly painted mural.
The storefront windows became photographs of their own. Instead of trying to eliminate the reflections, I started using them. Cars, people, furniture inside the shops and buildings across the street all piled together in the glass. In one image, two people walking past seemed to be standing inside a room that was actually behind me. In another, the shop interior blended into a parked car and the buildings across Broadway. They were messy images, but that was what I liked about them. They felt more like being on the street than a perfectly clean photograph of a storefront would have.
The Old Theatorium
A few blocks from Broadway I came across one of the most remarkable buildings I saw in Red Lodge. The old Theatorium, built in the early 1920s, still carries an elaborate theater façade covered with sculpted faces, masks, figures and decorative stonework. The interior was largely gutted decades ago, but the front remains surprisingly intact. I stood there for quite a while photographing it because the more I looked, the stranger it became. I thought what a waste for such a structure to be left to just decay. Hopefully, someone with a vision and money can find a better use for this property.
There was a large crest along the roofline, theatrical figures worked into the façade and faces staring out from the masonry. One in particular looked almost like Medusa, embedded high in the brickwork. It was an extraordinary amount of ornamentation for a building in a town this size, and that contrast was probably what made it so interesting. I had spent most of the evening photographing modest storefronts, old signs and ordinary street life, and suddenly here was this wildly decorative theater façade sitting only a few blocks away.
Near the end of my walk, I passed Red Lodge Pizza Company and saw a sign out front saying they served ice cream. That got my attention immediately. Ice cream has a way of overriding whatever plan I thought I had, so I went in. The place had a modern-retro feel, with a soda fountain counter, glowing shelves lined with glasses, old Coke bottles on display and a look that felt cleaner and more polished than I expected to find in a pizza shop. I ordered two scoops and decided it was time to stop moving for a while.
The place was busy, but I had the counter to myself, which suited me fine. After spending hours walking the town, it felt good to sit there and take it in. The lighting, the glassware, the old-fashioned soda fountain touches and the steady flow of people gave it a different feel from the bars and storefronts I had been photographing outside. It wasn’t fancy and it wasn’t trying too hard, but it had enough character to make me glad I had followed the sign in. More importantly, the ice cream was exactly what it needed to be, which made it one of the easier decisions of the day.
I had arrived expecting Red Lodge mainly to be a staging point for the Beartooth Highway, but I was having a good time just photographing the town. The overcast light that had ruined my plans earlier in the day was actually working pretty well for street photography, especially with the old brick, painted signs and reflections.
By the time I finished walking around Red Lodge, it was getting late and I still needed somewhere to spend the night. Red Lodge Mountain ski area was about seven miles outside town, and overnight camping was permitted in its lower parking lot. That solved the problem nicely, so I drove out toward the ski area, signed the online waiver, and found out I could stay for up to seven days. On the way up, I had to stop twice for bears crossing the road. As I settled in for the night, I checked the weather and saw heavy rain was expected the next day, followed by snow on the Beartooth Highway. I decided I would figure out what to do in the morning.