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Montana Mountain Passes

Every Montana pass worth naming, how high it is, whether it gates for the winter or stays open, what the record says about when the gate moves, and the agency that publishes today's status.

In the seasons the agencies have published, Going-to-the-Sun Road over Logan Pass has closed around October 21. That is a median of past seasons; today's status is with the agency linked below.
Passes on this page
4
Gated for winter
2
With a published record
1
With a snow station on them
2
Current status

Where Montana pass status is published

Check the agency below before you drive. Gate decisions are made by highway crews and park rangers looking at the road, and they change inside a day.

Montana has the single best pass record in the United States and almost nothing else. Glacier National Park has published the opening and closing of Going-to-the-Sun Road every year since 1933, with a lettered footnote on each unusual season explaining whether it was an avalanche, a rockslide, a government shutdown, a fire or a pandemic. Montana’s highway department publishes no usable machine readable road data, so the live half of this page is snowpack and weather rather than a road reading.

A highway snowplow throwing a wall of snow off the shoulder of a two lane mountain road
The reason a gate date is not a calendar date. Reopening a gated pass is not a matter of waiting for a thaw: a crew drives a rotary blower into drifts that can stand thirty feet above the pavement, and they do it under slopes that are still loaded. That is why the same road can open on 2 April in one year and 22 July in another, and why no agency on this page will name a date in advance. “Snow Plowing Jones Hole Highway (51313598806)” — USFWS Mountain Prairie — Public domain
Measured right now

What instruments are reading on the Montana passes

Check the agency below before you drive. Gate decisions are made by highway crews and park rangers looking at the road, and they change inside a day.

National Park Service, Glacier National Park publishes its road conditions through a keyed system, so this page reads no live Montana road feed. What it reads live is federal: measured snowpack from the USDA network, and National Weather Service products for the state. For the road itself, the Glacier National Park road status page is the source and the pointer above is the link.

Our own summary of information published by National Park Service, Glacier National Park. A state agency’s words are its own, so this is a restatement of the facts rather than a copy of the page.

Measured snow on the passes

Reading measured snow depth from SNOTEL.

A SNOTEL weather station in a forest clearing, a tall mast and instrument shelter standing over an open patch of snow
A SNOTEL station: a sonic ranger on the mast measuring the distance down to the snow surface, and a fluid filled pillow buried under the pack weighing the water in it. That second number is the one that matters to a plow crew, because two feet of dry January powder and two feet of April corn are not the same job. Note also what the picture shows: a clearing in trees, not a roadway. This is why every depth on this page carries its station name and elevation. “Cloud Peak SNOTEL site in Montana” — USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service — Public Domain

National Weather Service winter products for Montana

Twenty of the National Weather Service’s one hundred and eleven product types are winter or road relevant, from a Winter Weather Advisory to a Snow Squall Warning to an Avalanche Warning. They are federal works in the public domain, which is why this is the one place on the page where somebody else’s live sentences appear word for word rather than in our own.

Reading National Weather Service products for Montana.

The forecast at one pass

A forecast for a valley town is not a forecast for the pass above it. Pick a pass and this reads the National Weather Service grid at that pass’s own coordinates, one pass at a time.

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The map

Every Montana pass on one map

Colour is winter behaviour: a purple or teal marker is a road with a gate that shuts for the season, and a dark marker is a road kept open all winter where what changes is the traction requirement. Enter a ZIP and the map moves to your state and names the county it matched, a county level match from the Census relationship file.

Style
Area
Size

4 passes around Montana. Colour is how the road behaves in winter: gated for the season, or kept open under chain control. Current status is published by the agency linked from each state page.

The record

What the published record says about the Montana gates

Check the agency below before you drive. Gate decisions are made by highway crews and park rangers looking at the road, and they change inside a day.

Going-to-the-Sun Road over Logan Pass

inside Glacier NP, 6,646 feet. The anchor of the whole set. Ninety published seasons without a gap since 1933, each unusual year carrying the park’s own footnote explaining it, which is the only record on this site where you can read the reason as well as the date.

Closing dates across 71 recorded seasons from 1952 to 2022

Median October 21. Earliest September 3 in 2017. Latest November 21 in 1952. That is a spread of 79 days, which is the number that matters more than the median does.

Reopening dates across 90 recorded seasons from 1933 to 2022

Median June 11. Earliest May 16 in 1987. Latest July 15 in 1933. That is a spread of 60 days, which is the number that matters more than the median does.

Going-to-the-Sun Road over Logan Pass. The gate is the alpine section between Avalanche Creek and Rising Sun, which is the part that closes.
SeasonOpenedClosedWhat happened
2022Jul 13Oct 16Exceptional avalanche year and continued winter weather through late June. West side closure Oct 1 for road rehabilitation work, a multi-year project. Logan Pass accessible from east side through Oct. 16.
2021Jun 25Oct 13
2020Jul 13Oct 9Late opening due to COVID-19 pandemic. Road open from West Entrance to Rising Sun only. First time in history a portion of the Going-to-the-Sun Road remained closed for an entire season.
2019Jun 22Sep 25
2018Jun 22Sep 29
2017Jun 28Sep 3Closure on west side due to Sprague Fire and subsequent road construction work. Logan Pass accessible from east side through Oct. 9.
2016Jun 16Oct 10
2015Jun 19Oct 5The road opened on the west side to Logan Pass on June 10, but the road did not fully open until June 19. East side closure for road rehabilitation work, a multi-year project. Logan Pass accessible from west side through Oct. 19.
2014Jul 2Sep 22East side closure for road rehabilitation work, a multi-year project. Logan Pass accessible from west side through Oct. 20.
2013Jun 21Sep 23Opened June 15 on east side from St. Mary to Logan Pass. Later opening on west side due to road rehabilitation work and snowstorms. Closed due to government shutdown.
2012Jun 19Sep 16West side closure for road rehabilitation work, a multi-year project; Logan Pass accessible from east side through Oct. 15.
2011Jul 13Sep 17Exceptional snowpack year and continued winter weather through June. West side closure for road rehabilitation work, a multi-year project; Logan Pass accessible from east side through Oct. 17.
2010Jun 24Oct 18
2009Jun 26Oct 19
2008Jul 2Oct 20
2007Jul 1Sep 16
2006Jun 23Oct 23
2005May 22Oct 31
2004May 30Oct 18
2003May 30Oct 28
2002Jun 28Oct 28
2001Jun 7Oct 22
2000May 27Oct 16
1999Jun 16Oct 15
1998May 29Oct 19
1997Jun 18Oct 21
1996Jun 21Oct 14
1995Jun 23Oct 16Logan Pass opened June 21 then closed after rockslide June 23; Pass reopened June 26.
1994Jun 2Oct 17
1993Jun 4Oct 18
1992May 23Oct 19Pre-established closing date set for Logan Pass. Pass closes to vehicle use on third Monday in October, weather permitting.
1991Jun 23Oct 24Late opening of Logan Pass; road damaged by avalanche.
1990Jun 18Oct 4
1989Jun 9Nov 3
1988May 25Nov 4
1987May 16Nov 16
1986May 31Nov 6
1985Jun 1Oct 15
1984Jun 14Oct 17
1983Jun 5Nov 6

Showing the most recent 40 of 90 recorded seasons. The full record is published by the agency at the link below.

Federal record: National Park Service, Glacier National Park, carrying its own stamp of last updated April 21, 2023. Public domain, so it may be reproduced. Read on 4 September 2026.

Why the footnotes matter more than the dates

Glacier attaches a lettered footnote to every unusual season, and several of its dates are actively misleading without one. The 1980 row shows the second earliest opening in the whole record. Here is what the park says about it.

“One of the earliest recorded opening dates, however the access to the pass closed the next day due to inclement weather and remained closed until June 6.”

Glacier National Park, Logan Pass opening and closing dates, footnote (d) on the 1980 row

A work of the United States government, in the public domain, so it is reproduced word for word. Read on 4 September 2026.

A reader who took 24 May 1980 as an early opening and planned around it would have found the road shut for the following twelve days. The same is true of 1995, which opened on 21 June and was closed by a rockslide two days later. And one footnote changes how the whole second half of the record should be read.

“Pre-established closing date set for Logan Pass. Pass closes to vehicle use on third Monday in October, weather permitting.”

Glacier National Park, Logan Pass opening and closing dates, footnote (f) on the 1992 row

A work of the United States government, in the public domain, so it is reproduced word for word. Read on 4 September 2026.

From 1992 the closing date is a policy rather than a weather signal. That flattens the spread of every closing after that year, which is why the closing median on this page is a weaker number than the opening median and why a trend line drawn through it would be measuring an administrative decision rather than a climate.

Gates without a published year by year record

Each of these closes for the winter. The agency publishes the road and a general window rather than a year by year record, so there is no median to compute; single seasons appear in press releases, and the agency pointer above carries the current status.

  • Beartooth Highway, US 212, 10,947 feet. Sixty eight miles between Red Lodge and Cooke City topping out at 10,947 feet, and an ownership tangle: the National Park Service maintains the Wyoming portion and some Montana segments, Montana DOT the forest ends, and Wyoming DOT explicitly none of it. No agency publishes a year by year table.

If Glacier National Park starts publishing a table for any of these, it will appear here.

Every pass

The full Montana inventory, gated and year round together

The two kinds of pass are searched for in identical words and answered in opposite ways, so they are on one table rather than two pages. A gated road has a date. A road kept open all winter does not, and anyone who tells you it usually closes in November has confused it with a different road. The list here is the Montana passes that appear in a machine readable agency feed, carry a snowpack station named after them, or have a published date record, which is the inventory that can be checked against a source.

PassRouteElevationWinter behaviourSnow station on it
Beartooth HighwayUS 21210,947 ftSeasonal gate closes for winternone
Badger Passno through road6,870 ftOpen all winter stays open, chains or traction may be requiredBadger Pass, 6,870 ft
Going-to-the-Sun Road over Logan Passinside Glacier NP6,646 ftPark road gate closes for winter, run by a parknone
Lolo PassUS 125,233 ftOpen all winter stays open, chains or traction may be requiredLolo Pass, 5,280 ft
A survey crew standing on top of a snow drift many times their height, beside a road cut through the snow
The Big Drift on Going-to-the-Sun Road, surveyed before plowing begins. It forms in the same place every year because the wind does the same thing every year, and it is routinely eighty feet deep. This is what stands between a spring thaw and an open gate, and it is why a median opening date has a two month spread around it on almost every road here. “Going-to-the-Sun Road - Surveying the Big Drift (5888850828)” by GlacierNPS, CC BY 2.0
Common questions

Montana mountain pass FAQ

Mountain passes by state

WashingtonCaliforniaColoradoMontanaWyomingUtah
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Mountain passes across the country, including the states with no page and the specific reason for each, and park road openings, which is the spring half of the same question.

Historic dates on this page come from the publishers named beside each table and were read on 4 September 2026. National Park Service material is a United States government work in the public domain and is reproduced. State highway department material is not, so their dates are restated here in our own structure. Measured snow depth comes from USDA NRCS SNOTEL, and live weather products from api.weather.gov, both federal and both public domain.
Gate status is published by the agencies linked above. The dates here are records of past seasons, and a median is a record of what happened rather than a statement about the road today.
Hero image: “Snowplows at Logan Pass (52201734565)” — GlacierNPS — Public domain