Top of the World Bar
Red Lodge celebrates summer opening with the Top of the World Bar
Then there was that one otherwise unremarkable day every June when, rounding the last few switchbacks in your descent to Long Lake, traffic was suddenly held up by a troupe of CanCan girls dancing along the center line while bartenders poured you shots from a bar carved out of the snowbank and an elephant danced on his hind legs with a can of Mountain Dew held in his trunk.
It’s incredible to imagine now, but from 1948 until the mid-‘80s, the Red Lodge Chamber of Commerce would pick a day soon after the Highway had been cleared of snow, ask the Park Service to plow out a large parking space in the center of one of the big switchbacks, and haul up a one-day carnival known as the Top of the World Bar.
Pius Meier, longtime chamber president recalls, “Our special drink was Mountain Dew with a double of shot of vodka. I tell you, you get people 70, 80 years old and you give them a shot of that–Oh boy! Everybody starts dancing!” Organizers would bring up the Festival of Nations flags and often a horse or two, and most importantly, bottles of liquor and soda donated by local businesses. In 1981, records show the bar went through 23 quarts of liquor, 10 bottles of wine, 16 cases of beer and 16 cases of soda pop. (Remember, until 2005, it was still legal to drink and drive in Montana!)
One year, the elephant (an attraction in Red Lodge’s See ‘Em Alive Zoo) was even painted pink. Past president Merv Coleman laughs, saying “People got out of their cars and saw the pink elephant and thought they’d already been drinking!” Ernie Strum adds “people were just amazed. They were incredulous that we’d have an elephant up there.”
The event was something fun Red Lodge wanted to do to welcome tourists, and the date had to be kept a secret because they didn’t want Red Lodge people to come en masse and drink up all the liquor. But, as organizer Marge McCarty put it, “I imagine it served to make people remember Red Lodge.” And make those of us who missed it down-right nostalgic.
