So what should I warn her about that location? Tourists? High cost? Level One medical in town? Do elk walk down the street in winter?

You won't last 12 months.

Winter is windy and cold, it’s nice the other 3 months. Health care is almost non existent. You’re are going to want to be closer to a larger city as you get older in order to get medical services.

Small town (pop. 2,500) with limited activities. But then you are only 1 hour form Billings (pop. 110,000).

Thanks Capt. Google.

Disregard

Red Lodge is awesome, downside is summer tourist, high real estate cost due to seasonal liberals.

It seems every summer half the homes in town are for sale , albeit at an inflated price, trying to get a tourist too pay to much.

Winters can be umm..... cold & snowy

You are at the base of the Beartooth's with unbelievable scenery and outdoor recreation.

They do have a hospital and for small town Montana that is something.

Oh and cant forget you have the snow creek saloon, good times.....

Follow this advice. We're finding it out more and more as time goes by and we've only been here two years +/-. Seems like once or twice a month one or the other of us is driving 2-4 hours to a specialist.

Fortunately we have 4 seasons..........kind of.

Geno

Red Lodge is only 1.5 hrs from the best health care Montana has to offer.
If you live there you will find yourself going to Billings often for shopping restaurants, doctor appointments etc....
If you can stand the winters it is a great place.
Do you ski?

In another week you will be calling us yankees

GFY, yankee.

To put a sharper point on things I will add that you should warn your wife that the Harley's arrive in June and don't leave until September 1st. The Beartooth Pass is a mecca of sorts so plan on infinite numbers of Corvette, Porsche, and motorcycle clubs planting stakes early.

"An hour from Billings" (it will be closer to 2) sounds great. Until she has to make that drive in the dead of winter. Plows don't run in rural MT the way they do in other places. In the summers you can't be in too much of a hurry either. Two lanes, lots of traffic and not a lot of opportunity to get around the 10 cars in front of you.

The Beartooth's are an amazing place but the majority of it is wilderness designated and isn't real easy to access unless you have horses or are in great shape. In the summer's you can expect insane levels of people even in the woods. This is a recent development in my opinion. I backpacked down there every summer for about 10 years and the amount of people today vs 2008 is staggering. I have gone down there on non-holiday weekends and was unable to find a camping spot on the north side of the pass. We are talking hundreds of possible spots here (both primitive and non) and every one was full.

When she wants to escape it all and drive down in Yellowstone any time between late fall and early spring, you can forget it. The pass is closed and stays that way.

When it is clear you can run down to the Cooke City Yellowstone area, but she better like Chinamen that dive out of moving vehicles to snap pics of buffalo, because that's what you're gonna see until about September.

Also, "having a hospital" is a far cry from having good medical care in my experience.

I personally could retire around a place like that but I would think most people would hate it after the first summer.

Red Lodge Cafe has the best sourdough pancakes I have ever eaten.

The guy is from Minnesota, and everyone is warning him about the winters....

TFF..

LMAO. I thought the same thing.

never been there but i'll offer expert advice. cold, crowded, expensive, schitty healthcare, nice scenery that you'll get sick of in a few months. entitled yuppies on motor sickles and driving cars that make up for their withered dicks.

sounds nice. for about a day.

Too many leaf lickers in red Lodge. To many clown cars. Town folks are very clannish. Couple of decent restaurants. They think bears in town are cute......

Plenty try though, making it a harrowing drive at best.

No need to go to Yellowstone for bear watching. There are plenty of griz within a few miles of town.

Temps might be comparable but snowpack and road conditions will definitely take some getting used to.

"sounds nice. for about a day"

Or until you have a heart attack!

You flatlanders have no idea. It's not temps or snowfall, but ice, wind, steep roads, minimal services like plowing. If your not pretty self sufficient, you should stay away. Anyone with ideas of retiring to the back woods of Montana is going to have a hard time as they get older. Putting on chains in blizzard sucks, even more so when your 85 . Everyone falls on the ice, because we get a lot, not so fun when you break a hip. Places like redlodge probably don't have anything more than a volunteer ambulance, so anything major will be a life flight to/from billings. The small clinic there won't be trauma rated. Real medical services will only be available in larger cities. I chose to live in the flathead because it has decent medical, shopping, and it's only a few minutes to Montana . I live 10 miles out of town and even here ambulance service, snow, plowing service, and police service is hit and miss.

What are you looking for in a community?
Every town has a personality and I would say redlodge has two. The locals are small town country. Friendly, but a little suspicious and exhausted by tourists and wealthy out of staters who move there only complain or tell them " this is how we did it in Wisconsin".
The area is beautiful but winter is real. You are in the mountains, plan to shovel some snow.
The highway has a pretty high mortality rate. They have done a lot of work to it but it is still two lane and solid traffic.

I was skiing at Red Lodge mountain several years ago and it started snowing so hard they closed the road to the ski resort! they were making plans for everyone to spend the night in the cafeteria.

Luckily they used the snowcat groomers to open the road so we could get out.

A lot of truth on this thread. And many different points of view. For the most part all are correct.

If you want to move to Red Lodge because it is pretty and bring liberal values with you and expect city type services, you will be disappointed and not last.

Montana is as much a lifestyle and frame of mind as it is a place.

Pick a spot with chitty winter weather... That will weed out the weak libtards by 80+%....

Hardly a flatlander...I lived in western Montana for 36 years before moving here.

Unfortunately no longer true. Now they simply buy homes and use them for the summer. In the winter they leave and things are peaceful and normal again.

I recommend visiting a possible relocation place during the bad part of the year. Also, have an exit strategy if it doesn't work out. (In a place with a seasonal real estate market, I would consider renting for a year.) Other than that, if you have the money, and it is a part of a dream scenario, why not.

P.S. Consider Cody, WY, on the other side of the mountain.

Thats about it.
The elk hunting isnt that great down there either from what I gather.

When talking about winter driving some things to consider. Montana hasnt figured out how to take care of roads during the winter worth a damn as compared to the midwest. Of course you dont have the pleasure of watching your vehicles rust apart in short order either.

Winters in WI and Mn are just as bad as Montana. You do have to deal with driving much farther distances in Mt , icy roads , and mountain passes. Have to much more self sufficient there. As mentioned major medical care can be located a long ways away. Beautiful area in Red Lodge but too many tourists for my tastes I think better options in Montana

I think close proximity to good medical care is very important when you get older especially in winter. As mentioned can be hours away do to weather and distance.

MN winters are cold, but redlodge gets much more snow as compared to most of MN. I lived in Upper MI for 20 some years before moving to MT and all the MN snowmobilers came to the UP for decent snow.

Cannot tell you anything about Red Lodge, but I can tell you not to believe a damn thing you see on Zillow. I have people all the time asking me about properties they see on Zillow that were sold literally years ago and Zillow still shows them as active. Also, their estimated values are usually always WAY off. Go to a local MLS site for the area you are looking at for accurate info. Also, Realtor.com is usually good. Another one to stay away from is homesite.com. They have great TV ads, but no interest in accuracy. Realtors have to pay them big bucks to get on their recommended list and contrary to what they claim or imply, any agent with the fee can get on their recommended list. Don't believe the TV ad BS. Yes, I am a licensed Realtor.

Watch out for the gangs......of turkeys.

Indeed......

A few moose too.

Raise your hand if you think this was taken in MN...

Holy-[bleep]!

When I lived in Montana I took a pic of my sisters BMW against a wall like that on June 1st on the Beartooth...

That really stings...

That's what she said...

You changed since our days as cops in the Bay City police department.. just because you fit in now wearing your white Oakley's and flat billed monster energy hat.. what next flying the confederate flag?

It IS pretty funny lecturing a Minnesotan about winter!

Minnesota winters are generally worse than Montana in that they're humid, cold, and gray.

MT winters are longer... ie, a couple months longer. But unless you're in the far Western part of the state, the Bitteroot to the Flathead, they're sunnier.

I'll take dry cold and sun with a longer winter over anything in MN.

As to Red Lodge, while nice to visit, there's no way I'd want to live there.

Sis lives and works in Whitefish and seems to like that area having moved from WI. then MN. Kind of pricey real estate there, but Columbia Falls looks okay just east of Whitefish. Kalispell is just south with a bigger population, good medical, airport. Flying into there is big bucks during the tourist season because of Glacier Park, but Amtrak is cheaper and stops in Whitefish on the way to Seattle.

This past winter was my first in MT and a record one for the part of MT I live in. Most mild winter I have seen in 25 years, but Upper MI has MN beat in the winter severity index by a fair bit.

I'd recommend a visit in late February or early March, to any town you are thinking about moving to in MT.

See it when the snow is black, and the ice is heaped up and 5" thick.

And the sky is gray.

July and December don't give you the whole picture of Montana. And September/October is a scam to sell houses.

Sycamore

Ben, the UP, like upstate NY, is sort of its own thing... but I will say, winters here in the mountains of SW Montana are still longer... but regardless, I wouldn’t trade them for a UP winter!

I noticed bozeman was about a month behind us weather wise. I put in for a job where buy I would live in the bozeman area, but am not sure how I feel about the climate.
BTW the UP has had low temps in the 30's already and last week it was in the 60's for highs.

http://www.city-data.com/city/Red-Lodge-Montana.html

Expensive,...but 95% Caucasian. In this age of forced diversity in America,..any place that can manage to remain 95% Caucasian is going to cost a premium to live there.

Thanks for all the comments. A number of options are in the mix.

Hahahaha.

This past winter's snowfall in South central Mt.was record breaking . We had 111" here in Columbus, Billings had 106" & I know of nobody that suffered because of it. I know Red Lodge's normal snowfall is 145" yearly, but I also know that I made many trips to Red Lodge this winter for grandkid's plays, concerts, sporting events and just to visit, and I have never even thought of missing an event because of weather. My route is 50 miles of river valley's and a quite long winding road from Roscoe to Red Lodge. Snow is not a problem in rural Montana, but watch out for I-90. The highways are solid ice more times than not. Still, hundreds of people drive to Billings (40 mi.) to work and visa versa every day.
I would however, not live in Red Lodge because the majority of the population is a bunch of libs. If you are a doctor or lawyer or very wealthy and know it, that's the place to live! The town is an old mining town and is made up of many nationalities. Just read a phone book from there!
By the way, Red Lodge has a new clinic and hospital and a very capable ambulance emt. service. Look up Billings Clinic.
New High School/ Middle School also.
I don't ski, but Red Lodge Mt. is well known for it's short lift lines and powder.
Like I said, I would never live there but not for any of the reasons some of you are stating!
Also my part of Montana has sunshine most of the winter unlike Western Mt.
There, I'm done,
Ken
Oh, if you like to barhop, you can hit more bars than you can handle on two sides of the street/highway in two or three blocks. Once many years ago, a friend and I had a beer in each of the 17 bars in one night!😁