Sweetgrass/Coutts Border Crossing, Montana

The Sweetgrass/Coutts crossing is the busiest crossing in Montana. Southbound is Interstate 15, which runs to Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, and northbound Highway 2 goes to Lethbridge and Calgary. The boundary separates the town of Sweetgrass, Montana, and Coutts, Alberta. The few homes that used to straddle the line disappeared long ago, and the line is now an open, unfenced space. A few backyards and a baseball field back on to this space, and the Boundary Commission has installed some extra monuments to make the line more apparent, as recently as 2014. Camera towers watch the line closely. At the west end of town is a shared airstrip, directly on the border. On the east side of town, the international boundary runs along the north side of Border Road, where two Canadian farmsteads, a few miles away, can only be reached from this US road. A large brick building west of the tracks is the old US Port of Entry, now privately owned, and used for freight handling and storage.  Next to it is the highway and the looming new Port of Entry building, which is shared by both countries. The large joint Port of Entry building was built by the US in 2004. It is one of the few joint Port of Entry buildings, a structure shared by both countries, though their spaces are distinctly divided within it. A dominant architectural feature is a corridor that runs through the structure along the boundary line like a rectilinear tube, with a glass wall on either end.