Jordan Lefler
Our Great Wide Open itineraries offer eight adventurous road trips. Each one highlights points of recreational, historical and cultural interest along routes designed to immerse you in one or more of the magnificent Badlands, Breaks and Beartooths landscapes. Whichever terrain captures your imagination, you’ll find an itinerary below that will help you explore it to the fullest.
Each of our itineraries features day-by-day descriptions of the trip’s route and points of interest, a map, and focused recommendations of the sights and experiences curated for four different traveler types:
Use these itineraries for inspiration and information as you plan your perfect Montana road trip from Badlands to Breaks to Beartooths. For more planning information and useful tips, check out our Travel Resources page.
Big Sky Country? Try Big Drive Country! For those road trippers seeking an unforgettable travel experience as expansive as the skies over Montana, this grand tour is for you.
Over the course of five days, travel from Montana’s northern reaches, where the enchanting breaks of the Missouri River cut through wide-open high plains, to the south, where the iconic Beartooth Mountains straddle the border with Wyoming.
The Badlands Loop packs a lot of punch into three short-and-sweet days of travel in the remote northeast corner of Montana.
Ideal as a summer road trip, this three-day journey showcases the rugged Beartooth Mountains (and the Absaroka Range beside them) as the unforgettable scenic centerpiece. The range includes Granite Peak and rocks that are nearly 4 billion years old.
Travel across Montana from its far eastern badlands edge straight to its heart in the prairie and on to the incredible protected river breaks terrain of the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument and the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in this five-day tour.
The Beartooths to Badlands Loop skirts the dramatic peaks of the Beartooth Mountains, crosses plains as vast as the big sky and reaches to the precipices of the badlands stretching across the eastern part of Montana.
Exhilarating, unique recreation and captivating history flow together in this four-day road trip where the Missouri River — the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument stretch of it specifically — makes up the centerpiece of the route.
Hit the wide-open road and wind your way from majestic mountains to astonishing badlands and back again, taking remote U.S. Highway 12 across a boundless prairie landscape to complete this six-day loop itinerary.
