Adventuring

Grand Teton Range

We just got back from a trip of a life time, something we've been meaning to do for years, we've been to Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.  It was incredible!  We flew to Salt Lake City, drove through northern Utah into Idaho and then into Wyoming.  We had a cabin in Jackson Hole at the Rustic Inn and it was beautiful, all cabins, a stream running through it, a huge breakfast every morning and an incredibly friendly and helpful staff.
Jackson Hole is about a 2 hour drive to Yellowstone (except that they had the roads torn up and were working on them-guess you can't work on roads when they're under snow) and the fact that some people prefer to do 25 in a 45 mph zone and those pulling their trailers or driving a Winnebago hauling a car and a boat could barely crawl up the roads, at Continental Divide we were at more that 8,000 feet.
That aside it was a beautiful drive giving us our first glimpse of the Grand Tetons and they were magnificant!  We've seen mountains before: lived in California and drove in the Sierra Nevedas, lived in Colorado and drove the Rocky Mountains, skied the German Alps, drove the Austrian Alps (well you get the idea), but we had never seen anything to compare to the Tetons.  No foothills, they just start looming up from the valley floor ranging from the lowest (Static Peak) at 11,305 to the tallest (Grand Teton) at 13,775.

Our Cabin

The Tetons are a subrange of the Rocky Mountains  that run from Alaska to northern New Mexico, but they are so different, so rugged, obviously a younger range of mountains that have not been eroded down yet.  To say we were awe struck is putting it lightly.  Luckily for us, and all the other tourists, the park provides places to pull over and take pictures--I guess they figured we'd all just be stopping in the road otherwise, it was that impressive.

Oxbow Bend

Jackson Hole sits at 6,237 feet above sea level and that's the lowest altitude we were at the whole trip.
We spent 2 days in Yellowstone and 2 days in Teton National Park, I'll talk about Yellowstone tomorrow.
The main animals in the 2 parks are: bears (brown and grizzly), moose, elk, antelope, bison and wolves.
We saw all of these except for the moose and wolves.  We also saw a marmot and a beaver plus Sandhill Cranes.
It was exciting to see the bear, he was running along a river when we spotted him.  Other folks there had gotten a picture of him and the guide with them said it was a grizzly-that's about as close to a grizzly as I want to get.
One of the prettiest spots within the park was at the Oxbow Bend turnout, it is known for its dramatic reflection of Mt Moran (12,605 ft.) and we'd read that moose water there, but we didn't see any.

String Lake With Mount St. John

Mac spent parts of 2 days fishing, it was a hard job finding places where you were allowed to fish with bait-very strict regulations and most of the better spots were reserved for fly fishermen.  But he caught a good-sized fish below the dam at Jackson Lake and a trout in the Gros Vendre river.  The water was beautiful, but the rivers were running high and fast because of snow melt, that made fishing a challenge.  I painted while he fished and managed one good painting.

Jackson Lake

View From Our Cabin

Jenny Lake

Mac Fishing on Small Part of
Gros Vendre