Click here for a link to the map!
This is the Third Leg of the trip. Here’s a link to Part 1 and Part 2 of the Second Leg, and a link to the First Leg, for good measure.
When I last wrote, I was leaving Yellowstone National Park after a minor meltdown at Old Faithful. It was rainy and cloudy, Old Faithful was crowded, and my room at the Old Faithful Inn was hot and dim and pretty much located right in the busy, touristy lobby. I was very unhappy, and skipped over most of the geyser basin sights in the Old Faithful area to head back towards the center of the park (see map), where I procured sugar & caffeine. This, plus enough cell service to allow for some contact with the rest of the world, lightened my mood.
About an hour south of Grant Village is the boundary between Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park. I was under the impression that Flagg Ranch, located right south of the Yellowstone border, was actually privately owned and not federal land, but it is unclear. There isn’t really even an entrance station for the Tetons at the north end of the park because there’s only the one road and either you’re heading for the Tetons or you’re heading for Yellowstone.
Here is a map of Grand Teton National Park. There are basically two roads in the park, and one loops off the other, with some smaller loops here and there, but the park is mostly in a long, wide valley (the valley itself is called Jackson Hole) with the Teton Range in a line from north to south, parallel to the road as you drive.
But I couldn’t see them.
It was cloudy and rainy, cloudy and rainy as I drove in from Yellowstone. I was actually in such a bad mood about Old Faithful and so ready to see some sunny blue skies that I was considering skipping over the Tetons and heading out. I hadn’t been able to take lovely landscape photos for (what felt like) days, and the idea of spending two nights in the Tetons amid more rain and clouds and rain, finishing my big vacation with a thud, well, the idea just broke my heart. The only ray of optimism was that the weather forecast for my last day (Tuesday, June 8, 2010) was partly cloudy, sun, pretty weather, happiness. This, plus the fact that I had already put a fairly pricey deposit down on the cabin in the Tetons (it was much more expensive than any of the Yellowstone options), were the only things keeping from straying from my itinerary.
My reservation was at Colter Bay, which you can see is at on the north side of the park. I stopped there to see if they had any openings, but they told me I wouldn’t be able to check in until much later. So I continued south. Clouds obscured the sky and the mountains. I was pretty sure I should be able to have a view to the west, but there was nothing visible. I reached Jackson, Wyoming, in early afternoon. I drove around Jackson Hole for a little while, but it was far too chichi for my tastes. It must be crazy during the winter and ski season. I stopped at the visitor’s center there, where I met a dog by the entrance. He was very content to get a head skritch from me, and it made me miss Martha Dog. But his owner came along before I had a chance to scoop him into my car and carry him off. I bought some postcards, wrote on them, and mailed them. (I actually mailed a lot of postcards on this trip, as usual, but I haven’t really mentioned it here.) And I just tooled around for a bit.
Just saw a raven push another raven off a Share the Road sign. – 3:36pm, June 7, 2010
National Elk Refuge, devoid of elk. I like it when people build a habitat for animals, and then the animals hide. http://yfrog.com/5hg6shj -3:39pm, June 7, 2010
Almost as good: new steam vent popping up in the middle of a parking lot for another steam vent in Yellowstone. -3:42pm, June 7, 2010
Eventually, done with Jackson, I headed north again on the main road (which is not just a main artery for the park, but also kind of a major highway in that part of Wyoming, getting some big trucks and speeding cars who aren’t very pleased when you want to pull off at every turnoff on the strip) until I got to Moose, where the southernmost entrance station for the Tetons is located, in addition to the Visitor’s Center. I stopped at the Visitor’s Center to get a map and poke around. I love the big topographic maps that they have in these places. I saw a lot of them, and I really just wanted to stare at them for hours. I love those.
Somehow, while I was in the Moose Visitor’s Center, the sky started to lighten up, and the clouds started to swirl around, and pretty soon I could see little bits of snow-capped mountains to the west. As I drove north on the Teton Park Road (the road that loops closest to the Tetons on the map), the clouds parted and blue sky was again visible and soon the sun was out. It couldn’t have been more perfect timing, as it was about 4pm. The clouds didn’t fully lift from the mountains for awhile, but I took a lot of photos anyway, first of the dramatic clouds against the rocky mountaintops, and then of beautiful landscapes with the sagebrush and trees and mountains as they cleared.
Blue sky and sunshine! Oh, it’s marvelous! http://yfrog.com/0xm8kkj -5:51pm, June 7, 2010
It was a gorgeous, gorgeous night. It made up for the whole cloudy morning, and the clouds the day before. In fact, afterwards, I was so pleased with my efforts that the whole next day, Tuesday, could be rainy and cloudy and thunderstorms, and I would still be pleased that I got a chance at some good Tetons shots.
I drove all the way up the Teton Park Road and then back over to the Moran Junction (see park map again) and south again on the main road (which is US Hwy 26), stopping at every turnout and getting every shot that they would allow me, just thrilled that the sky and light were working out. At the Snake River Overlook (famous for the Ansel Adams shot), I got some lovely shots where the skies were doing something very similar to what they were doing in his shot (not that mine will be anywhere near the same league, but part of the fun of photography is doing your own version of the famous shots). After that, I continued south to Schwabacher’s Landing Road. This is a spot with access to the Snake River for canoes and fishermen, and is almost as famous with photographers as the Snake River Overlook. There are paths next to the river for quite a distance, so I pulled my camera and tripod out and went in search of a good spot for sunset.
Almost immediately after I started down the trail, I noticed that something was swimming up the river against the current, and I guessed it was an otter. Soon after this, though, I saw a big group of people with binoculars and cameras who were out wildlife-spotting. They asked me if I’d seen the beaver, and I replied that I had just as another one came swimming up against the current. This one got close to the group on the shore and slapped his tail against the water at us. I guess he thought we should move on, so a few minutes later, the wildlife spotters continued back to their vans and I moved on down the path next to the water. (Later I did confirm that I was right that they were otters, not beavers. I felt victorious in my wildlife-identification prowess, even if my binoculars aren’t as good as theirs.)
I had a lovely sunset down at Schwabacher’s Landing, where a few beaver dams have turned part of the river into a lovely still lake perfect for reflections of the Cathedral Group of the Tetons. Afterwards, I went back up to the main highway and back to the Snake River Overlook, because just the elevation change of a few dozen feet from the level of the Snake River meant that the sun was still out there. But there were so many photographers jockeying for the best positions at the overlook that I went back to my car, drove back south and stopped at a turnout to wait and watch as the sun set. It was quite beautiful.
It was dark when I was ready to head north again, and it took about thirty minutes to reach Colter Bay from that area on the south side of the park. But I checked into my cabin there, and it was quite pleasant. I had not had a great selection when I made the reservation, so the place was a little bigger than I really needed, but it was nice and had its own bathroom. And it was far and away an improvement over Old Faithful Inn.
After eating a sandwich and doing my backups, I turned in for the night. I was completely satisfied with how the day had turned out. If the weather reports for Tuesday were true, it would be a marvelous end to a trip that had had a lot of ups and downs.
My alarm went off early the next morning, but I was not ready for it. By the time I rolled out of bed and checked through the window at the sky, I was startled to see a snow-capped mountain already glowing pink in the first light of day. I tore myself out of bed, threw on my hiking clothes, pulled all my equipment together, and stuffed into the car in a haze of excitement at my first pretty sunrise in nearly a week. I drove off from the cabin, forgetting maps and a bunch of other stuff, too frantic at the idea of figuring out where to go.
I drove south out of Colter Bay, searching for good photos and trying to shake off sleep. Just south of the Jackson Lake Lodge, I left the clear sky and entered a very foggy area, but I pulled over at the Oxbow Bend Turnout anyway, where a stack of photographers were waiting, tripods set up, brows furrowed. The mountains were clouded over here, but the spot is so perfect that if they waited long enough, they might be rewarded with a lovely dramatic image of clouds lifting and Mount Moran reflected in the mirror lake surface. Most of them had probably been set up since before dawn. I, who was not so tethered to a spot, was not disappointed that Mount Moran wasn’t visible, but was instead mesmerized by the way the sun was filtering through the fog on the pretty oxbow lake, and I took a lot of pictures even as the stoic tripod-users looked on with little interest. Too bad for them! I moved on south, where the beautiful light caught my eye every which way, and I stopped every few minutes until all of a sudden the trees cleared and I realized that it the fog was just getting heavier as I continued south. So I turned around and went north again, stopping for lots of photos.
I’m getting a little hazy on the timeline, but it was after I turned around a second time, and the light was starting to get a little less pretty, that a bear stumbled out of the woods and crossed the road directly in front of my car. I was not going very fast at the time, but I was the only car on the road, and the bear (a black bear) seemed pretty surprised to see me. After he ambled across the road (there is really no other word to describe a bear walking other than “ambling” or “rambling”; that’s just the way they move), he stopped on the shoulder and turned around to get a better look at me, even standing on his hind legs while I (who had my big lens on my camera already) took some pictures. Then, still not sure of me, the bear ran off into the woods. As I drove by the spot where he crossed, I couldn’t see him in the woods, but I was pretty sure he was watching me. Another bear encounter! I was so excited by my great luck with seeing bears.
The sun was getting high enough that the rush of sunrise photos was not necessary anymore. What was necessary was my map, which I’d left back at the cabin. So I turned around, went back to the cabin to pick up everything I’d forgotten, stopped for another bottle of Frappuccino (already addicted), and drove around the Colter Bay area, which is on the north side of Jackson Lake. It has quite a pretty beachfront with the mountains in the background.
Eventually I headed south again. I was intruiged by the name Two Ocean Lake, so I drove down the road in that direction for awhile before (again) the rutted-out condition of the gravel road and the fact that no one else seemed to be driving down there (and the lack of cell service) made me turn around again before I got a chance to see it. (I was certain it’s called Two Ocean Lake because it runs along the Continental Divide, and probably drains out to both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, but apparently I’m wrong.)
When I got back to the main road, I drove west again and then turned at the Jackson junction (after getting a bit of a look at the international-style Jackson Lake Lodge) and drove south on the Teton Park Road. I drove up the road to the top of Signal Mountain, where the view of the Jackson Hole valley is quite pretty.
One of the goals for the middle part of the day, when the sun was high, was to take the trail from the String Lake trailhead around Jenny Lake to Hidden Falls. The trail is about five miles in total. Alternately, a person could pay a few bucks to be ferried across Jenny Lake, but I had missed most of the hiking opportunities in Yellowstone and was ready to stretch my legs.
First, though, I wanted to eat lunch, and I could eat at a picnic table since the weather was so good and picnic tables were plentiful. There were many at the picnic area near the String Lake trailhead, so I pulled out some food and went looking for an open table. The tables were scattered at short distances in the woods- I couldn’t really see my neighbors at a nearby table because of the trees, but I could hear them and many other picnicking families. I wasn’t very far from the parking area, but I was still on the edge of the picnic grounds, which was surrounded by a simple split wood fence. I could only see chipmunks, who inched closer and closer to me as I sat and ate, clearly hoping that I would feed them.
I tweeted:
Being stalked by chipmunks… – 2:06pm, June 8, 2010
Which felt kind of silly, but they were cute and I was having a nice time watching them zip around my ankles in the hope of a dropped raisin.
No more than a minute or two later, the sound of something moving on the other side of the split wood fence caught my attention. As I’d already seen a hiker or two emerge from the general area to the west, I thought it was a person for a second, but then I realized that it was an animal. In my mind, I somehow hoped it was a moose, but just as quickly I realized that, no, it’s a bear, oh shit, it’s a bear. At the same time, the black bear took notice of me and we made eye contact. He was not more than fifty feet away, though the split wood fence was between us. In an instant, I had gathered up all of my lunch stuff and was up over the picnic bench and headed back to my car. As I passed the table nearest me, the family picnicking there caught sight of the bear as well. They had whistles with them, which I guess they thought would scare off the bear, but they didn’t immediately pack up. I did not wait around, but headed for my car. A minute or so later, they too emerged from the woods, unscathed, carrying their lunches. But I am not sure that any other picnickers realized that a bear was in the area.
Was joking about the chipmunks. NOT JOKING that a black bear just scared me off my picnic table. -2:14pm, June 8, 2010
I don’t think I had been in any actual danger. Black bears are not as aggressive as grizzly bears, but they will attack if they believe their food source is in danger. The bear and I had just made eye contact, and I could not even say how long that eye contact was. It felt like seconds passed, but I am sure it was no more than half a second at most before I grabbed up all my stuff and darted away. Even so, that is not necessarily the approved instructions for bear flight, but this particular bear didn’t strike me as being terribly fast, and my assessment of the situation was that I could turn tail and flee without too much probability of the bear running after me. He was very likely a regular visitor to the picnic grounds and knew what he would find if he went there at certain times on warm days- food, possibly left out on a table by people dumb enough to leave food out in bear country.
All the same, it took awhile for me to calm down after the bear sighting.
Have now seen seven bears total. Definitely taking bear spray on this hike. -2:19pm, June 8, 2010
The bear spray I’d bought before the trip had been sitting in a bag of hiking gear. I hadn’t really had a chance to hike yet, but I was feeling a little embarrassed for going overkill in the purchase of the bear spray. Friends had laughed. But they didn’t think I would encounter a bear. Since I was still intent on taking the Hidden Falls trail around Jenny Lake, and since the trailhead was not a mile from the picnic grounds, it was now my chance to take the bear spray, and I certainly felt better with it, even though it was tucked in my bag rather than being readily attached to my belt. I also velcro’d the bear bell to the side of my bag, though I silenced it for the time being. I hoped I would be around a few people on the trail so that it wouldn’t be necessary to announce my presence with the bear bell.
The trail to Hidden Falls, even from the trailhead at String Lake, is pretty popular. I managed to stay within sight of a few hikers on the way there, despite stopping every few dozen feet to take photos. The road there passes through countryside that was recently hit by forest fire, but the fallen trees and limbs provide shelter to yellow-bellied marmots, which are numerous. They were pretty cute. They were also constantly surprised that I would be on the trail, even though hundreds of people must pass there every day. They had a way of freezing in place and watching closely as I approached, and then running off to hide not even feet away from the trail and grunting as I passed. I am sure that routine must get tiresome as the summer progresses.
I enjoyed the pleasant hike on the trail until it met up with the trail from the ferry that crosses Jenny Lake. Then there were a lot of people around, and it was muddy from all the recent rain. It was also a steeper trail here than I expected, though I am not sure why I thought it would be more level. I wasn’t the only one- I passed a couple in their sixties who were wearing what I would describe as church clothes, totally inappropriate.
Hidden Falls itself was worth the walk. And the waterfall itself was hidden from view until nearly the last second. I enjoyed the walk next to the cascades of the river, and kind of thought that that would be the extent of the falls, but I was rewarded with a much larger waterfall than I expected. I am not sure I got much in the way of photos though, as I had not wanted to lug my tripod down the trail. And I’m glad I made that decision, as the falls themselves were in full sun.
On the way back to the trailhead, I didn’t pass anyone for quite awhile and felt pretty alone on the trail, so I did let the bear bell ring as I walked. If I thought I got dirty looks from the marmots before, they really hated that bell. There were lots of glares and loud bitching from behind fallen wood.
I reached my car much later than I thought- it took an hour more to do the trail than I had planned, so it was after 5pm. I was happy to store my bear spray away again in the car, and I set off down the road. The String Lake trailhead is on the loop near Jenny Lake, which is quite pretty but also the most expensive place to stay in the park.
The light was getting good as I finished the drive down the Teton Park Road to Moose Junction. I had stopped a few times for photos on the way, but the road runs so close to the base of the Tetons that it doesn’t have nearly the same kind of grand vistas as are available on the main road across the valley.
I headed back to the Snake River Overlook, and my evening was pretty similar to the night before in terms of where I was at what time. I had great light at the Snake River Overlook before the sun (which sets behind the Tetons) dropped into view, and then I went back down to schwabacher’s Landing, where I wanted to find a place to shoot sunset again.
There were no wildlife watchers down there this time, but there were a couple of other photographers who arrived later than me. But since I was flitting around, indecisive about where to go to take my pictures, they got really the best spot in the area, with a perfect view of the Cathedral Group framed by trees reflected in the mirror surface of a lake created by a small beaver dam. All the same, because I didn’t feel tethered to a spot, I moved around and got a number of shots before the sun dropped behind the mountains. And still I stayed on, because the light in the sky stays for more than an hour after the sun is gone. I was hesitant to leave, as it was my last night in the Tetons on the trip, and it was lovely. I sat next to the Snake River and looked at the mountains for a quite a long time by myself.
Eventually I made it back to my car and headed north to my cabin at Colter Bay. My last night! And I’d had two (well, one and a half) beautiful days of weather to cap it all off.
The next morning, I was up before dawn, eager to have one last sunrise before heading east. I did a lot of the packing the night before, but it still took a few trips between the cabin and the car before I was loaded up. I had an extra bottle of Frappuccino ready to go.
After checking out of the cabin, my plan was to return to the Oxbow Bend Turnout and see if I could get a good shot of morning light on Mount Moran. So I parked there, set up my tripod, and waited. But the sun did not come out. I stuck around just in case, but eventually it was clear that it would be a cloudy day in the Tetons. I could not complain after such a beautiful day on Tuesday, and it was time to head out. So I turned east on the highway at the Moran Junction and climbed out of the Jackson Hole valley.
I think that road gets a good view of the Tetons for a few miles, as I could catch a glimpse here and there in my rearview mirror. I was pretty sad to leave. Still, I had at least a couple of things on my itinerary for the day, and I was still excited about them.
(Here’s a link to the Fourth Leg of the trip.)
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