What a bonus!  Your entire journey will be on Montana Scenic Drives. The  Skalkaho Pass Scenic Drive, which takes you on one of the least traveled roads in America, connects the Bitterroot Valley Scenic Drive and the Pintler Veterans’ Memorial Scenic Highway. Cradled by the Bitterroot and Sapphire Mountains, the Bitterroot Valley is named after the small pink blossoms and succulent roots of the Montana state flower. Turning off the Bitterroot Valley Scenic Drive at Hamilton puts you on the Skalkaho Pass Scenic Drive. Built in 1924 to link mountain mining areas with the Bitterroot Valley, the narrow, winding drive takes you through an isolated, mountainous 23,000-acre wildlife area thick with spruce and fir. Blue jays, juncos, sparrows, flycatchers, and woodpeckers, coexist with bull elk, mountain goats, moose, mule deer, badgers, coyotes and black bears. Once you reach Philipsburg, a traditional Montana western town, and get on the Pintler Veterans’ Memorial Scenic Byway, you’ll quickly find it’s a microcosm of Montana in a few miles. Skirting the Flint Creek Mountain range – referred to as the towering Pintlers – the drive has gorgeous mountain scenery with peaks rising over 10,000 feet. Georgetown Lake, spanning 3,700 acres at an elevation of 6,425 feet, comes along with you on the road following the land for miles. Just up the road, you can explore a Ghost Town (there are 60 in Montana) that was once a bustling silver mining town.