Busy

I'll finish posting for this Yellowstone trip when I have time, but we got home to some things that have kept us busy, such as a new hardwood floor in the living room.

Inspiration Point and the Snake River

On Monday, June 3rd, we went to breakfast in the Mural Room, again with a table by the windows.  We took the breakfast buffet:  not bad, but the usual buffet items of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, cereals, pastries, waffles, French toast.  At the next table was a Canadian couple who had emigrated from the U.S. seventeen years ago, keeping dual citizenship.  Some years ago, the Canadian National Health system had taken them very well through a medical emergency that would have wiped out their finances if they had still been living here.

It was much cooler than the day before, in the upper 40s, and windy.  We dressed accordingly, in three or four layers.  We took the Teton Park Road back south, to the Jenny Lake Scenic road.  We stopped, out of curiosity, at the Jenny Lake Lodge, to see what would have justified paying four times what we were paying at Jackson Lake.  It's very nice, in a rustic-elegant sort of way, cozier than the other lodge.  Outside, a raptor rescue center was showing off some of its birds: a golden eagle, a great horned owl, a Lanner's falcon and a hawk of some sort.

We went on to the Jenny Lake Visitor Center and went down to the dock for the boat ride across the lake to the Hidden Falls trailhead.  The crossing is $7.00 one-way, $12.00 round-trip.  The trailhead is a two-and-a-half-mile walk along the lakeshore, which might have been nice, but we didn't have the time.  Jenny Lake is right at the foot of the mountains, surrounded by lodgepole pines.  It was a dark, dark blue, ruffled by the wind--I needed to make sure that my hat was tied on securely.

The company that runs the lake shuttle rents boats, but only when the water is above 55 degrees, and today it definitely was not!  The captain gave us our hiking options: Hidden Falls was half a mile from the boat landing.  From there, you could go another half-mile, up (with an altitude gain of about 300 feet) to Inspiration Point, with a great view over the lake.  From Inspiration Point, you could continue up Cascade Canyon, on a trail that would become first slushy, then with snow over your ankles.  After the twelve-minute ride across the lake, we took the first two options, with a crowd of other people.  At the dock there is a rack full of hiking sticks to borrow.  We didn't take any, and really didn't need any, though they might have made a not-difficult trail even less difficult.

Certainly, the trail up Cascade Creek to Hidden Falls was pretty easy, though the signage wasn't as good as it could have been.  Some people, us included, mistook a cascade lower down for Hidden Falls, and when we actually got to Hidden Falls, we missed the turnoff and at first saw it only through the trees, saying, not so jokingly, that that was why it was called Hidden Falls.  Just after that muddy turnoff, the main trail crosses a bridge and starts going up and up, eventually coming to a natural staircase of granite ledges, ending at Inspiration Point (altitude around 7200 feet), a natural platform with a view over the whole lake.  Nice.

When we got back across the lake to the visitor center (after greeting the breakfast Canadians, who were headed in the opposite direction), we decided to get in another hike before lunch and our float trip.  The ranger at the visitor center in Moose had recommended the Taggart Lake trail.  I was skeptical of our ability to do the entire three-mile hike in an hour, but Mary Joy said that we needed to do more walking, so we continued down the Teton Park Road to the Taggart Lake trailhead.  The trail was uphill, along a creek, with no good views.  Near the beginning we passed a corral that contained a number of mules and a few horses.  About two thirds of the way to the lake, it was time to turn back.  Not one of our most wonderful hikes.  As we were about to leave, we got a phone call saying that the pickup for our float trip would be delayed fifteen minutes, from 3 o'clock to 3:15.

We drove into Moose, to the Dornan's complex.  Dornan's has a grocery store and deli, several restaurants, a souvenir store, cabins, etc., etc.  The deli makes good sandwiches, so we picked up some and went over to the visitor center, where we found a picnic table and had lunch.

Still having time before 3:15, we looked around the visitor center.  Then we went out to the parking lot, where we found that the people from Triangle X were there with a big black and red rubber raft on a trailer behind a van.  It turned out that they hadn't been delayed after all, so we were the last to arrive of the three couples on the trip.

We had looked at reviews (on Tripadvisor and elsewhere) of companies running the standard ten-mile float trip on the Snake River, through Grand Teton National Park from Deadman's Bar to Moose.  Reviews for the three principal companies, Barker-Ewing, Solitude and Triangle X, were almost unanimously positive.  Triangle X (whose principal business is a dude ranch), however, was the only one with a 3 p.m. trip, which was the best fit with the rest of our schedule.  Again, age has its advantages: my AARP membership brought the price down from $65 to $59 per person.

So, in the visitor center parking lot, we met the boatman (Adam, a bearded young guy in a baseball cap), the van driver (Jack), and our fellow passengers: a couple who had just driven in from California, on their way to the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone National Park, and had gotten onto this trip at the last minute; and a couple from Naperville, Illinois, who were on their way to Yellowstone, Glacier National Park and the national parks in the Canadian Rockies.

We got into the van and Jack drove us to Deadman's Bar.  We were fitted with lifevests and told the groundrules. Then Jack backed the trailer into the river, Adam got the raft afloat and we boarded, we and the Californians at one end and the people from Illinois at the other end (the raft was designed to hold as many as sixteen passengers).   Jack drove away and Adam cast off.

It was a very pleasant trip.  Adam deftly handled the two oars from a platform at the middle of the raft.  He has eight years of experience and takes two to four trips a day during the season, but this is his last year doing this, because he starts medical school in the fall.  He told us about the geology of the area and pointed out places to look for wildlife.  This was not the best time for that, since the animals usually come out in the morning and evening, but we did see four bald eagles (one of them towing a long branch behind it, apparently for nest-building), an osprey being chased by a red-tailed hawk, and a mule deer fawn, curled up in a ball, at the foot of a rocky bank.  At times, we were carried along with a rush of riffled water, but mostly we just floated, steered by Adam around any obstacles--he pointed out where, just the day before, another (unnamed) company's raft had gotten hung up on a dead tree, which had grounded on a sandbar.  The danger was that if all the people were no one side of the raft, the force of the water would catch the raft's bottom and flip it, tumbling all the passengers into the water.  Adam said that he had arrived at this point while the other raft was hung up, and had landed his raft to wait, helplessly, in case he were needed to rescue anyone.  Eventually, however, the other boatman managed to get his raft off the snag.

After beginning the trip between high embankments, which looked artificial, like levees, but which actually were the result of glacial flooding, thousands of years ago, we came out into a magnificent vista: the entire forty miles of the Teton range.  It is a view that one can never tire of.  We passed by Menor's Ferry, the way across the river in the late nineteenth century: a heavy metal cable spanning the Snake.  Then came Dornan's, on the left bank and shortly thereafter we landed, on the right bank,by the park headquarters.  This is where the van pickups normally take place, but they were changed to the visitor center parking lot because of construction around the park headquarters.

We walked over to the visitor center, got into our car and drove out the  Antelope Flats road.  We'd heard that there were bison there, with calves.  At first, we didn't see any, but while we were out there we went down Mormon Row, with its famous viewpoint of an old barn, with the Tetons in the background.  At the time we left home, there was a billboard as you crossed the Mississippi into St. Paul on I-35E, advertising Wyoming tourism, showing exactly this vista.  I didn't get the same ideal conditions for my shot: clouds hid the tops of some of the mountains.

On our return to the highway, we saw a bison herd in the distance, but it wasn't close to the road, so I couldn't get a good photo.  We drove back north on the Teton Park Road, enjoying the spectacular scenery, until we got to the road to the summit of Signal Mountain.  We took maybe half an hour to drive up the twists and turns, past some bicyclists (!), to the parking lot near Jackson Point.  William Henry Jackson, photographer with the 1871 Hayden Expedition, which led to the creation of Yellowstone National Park, took a photo from this spot, at 7700 feet above sea level and more than a thousand feet above Jackson Lake, looking across the lake to Mt. Moran. He developed the glass plate in a tent on the spot.  Since it was around 7 p.m., with the sun right above the mountains to the west, the light wasn't ideal either for viewing or photography, but it was still wonderful.  You could look almost all the way down the valley, over the green sagebrush plain.

We drove back down the mountain, to the Signal Mountain Lodge, where we went into the main restaurant, The Peaks.  The view through the windows was almost as spectacular as at the Mural Room.  Mary Joy decided to try the wildlife sliders--three small elk and bison hamburgers.  I had chicken with a rosemary sauce.  Not as good as the previous evening's meal at the Mural Room.

We headed back toward the Jackson Lake Lodge, but stopped at a lakeside turnout along the way, to watch the little pink clouds floating over the mountains across the lake.  When we got to the Lodge, we went up to the lobby to watch Mt. Moran in the deepening dusk.  Then we went to bed.

The Tetons

On Sunday, June 2, 2013, we caught the 10:29 a.m. Frontier flight from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Denver, and there, after an uneventful flight, we caught the 12:50 p.m. flight to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, arriving around 2:10.  Hertz, Avis and, I think, Budget have desks and cars at the airport, but Thrifty, with which we had a reservation, has a shuttle van, which drove the four-and-a-half miles south into the town of Jackson (the airport is actually in Grand Teton National Park), through the town and out the other side.  The Thrifty car rental office was in a sort of shack, behind some other buildings at the western edge of Jackson.  Since they had no small cars available, we were upgraded to a charcoal gray Nissan Altima, with only 125 miles on it: very comfortable.

 The weather was very nice, mid-70s and partly cloudy.  We drove up to Moose in about half an hour, and went into the National Park's Craig Thomas Visitor Center, where we asked a ranger about hikes and drives in the Park.  We had hoped to take the Jenny Lake morning ranger walk to Inspiration Point, but there are no ranger walks until June 10.  The Park's website and other information had had no schedule as to when ranger walks would start for the summer season--this may have had something to do with the federal government's budget sequestration, which has resulted in certain service cutbacks both here and in Yellowstone.  Or maybe ranger walks and talks just get started later in Grand Teton than in Yellowstone.

In any case, since I'm now 62, I stopped at the permit desk and got a permanent Senior Pass card to all the National Parks, etc., for $10.

We drove out the Moose-Wilson Road, looking for moose, but not seeing any.  We stopped at the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve Center, which is a wonderful place, more of a library and nature-meditation center than a visitor center for a nature preserve, though it is that, too.  The Rockefeller family were heavily involved in the 1950 expansion of the Park (see Ken Burns's wonderful TV series on the National Parks for details).

On our way back to Moose, we came to a spot where there were a number of cars lined up on both sides of the road.  In these parks, that is an invariable sign that someone has sighted wildlife.  We followed people down a path to the creek, where, sure enough, about a dozen avid photographers were standing well back from the water, taking pictures of a female (cow) moose, standing in the middle of the stream, unconcernedly dipping her head into the water for food or drink.  After a while, she walked over to the opposite bank, clambered up out of the water and strolled into the woods, out of sight.  So all the tourists went back up the path to the road, got into their cars and drove off.

Back at Moose, we turned onto the Teton Park Road and headed north.  The views of the mountains were truly spectacular.  At times, we were driving straight towards them.  At other times, we were passing along their base and would stop at turnouts to view them and (of course) take pictures.

The Grand Teton range (named by imaginative French beaver trappers in honor of the mountains' supposed resemblance to certain parts of female anatomy), resulted from the cracking of the earth's surface due to west-east tectonic pressures about nine million years ago, leading to uplift on the west side of the fault and dropping on the east side of the fault.  The resulting valley was largely filled in with dirt by glaciation and other erosion, so that now there are a series of glacial lakes at the foot of mountains, which rise to altitudes of 10,000 to 13,000 feet (3,000 to 4,000 meters) nearly straight up over a valley that has an altitude of only 6,200 feet (less than 2,000 meters).  Through this valley, coming out of the largest of the lakes, Jackson Lake, is the Snake River, which eventually flows into the Columbia River, which flows into the Pacific.

We checked into a "cabin" (really a 1950s motel room at the end of a block of four or five, in the woods) at the Jackson Lake Lodge.  The main lodge building has a lobby with huge picture windows directed head-on at Mt. Moran, to the southwest across willow flats (moose habitat) and the lake.  At 7 o'clock we had dinner at the Lodge's principal restaurant, the Mural Room. Our table for two was right at the windows, with the Tetons hovering over us, distracting us from eating.  Mary Joy had local Idaho red trout (from just over those mountains, as our waiter said), whose flesh had a pink color, like salmon.  I had coq au vin.  We agreed that the food was good, but not great--you pay for the view more than anything.

After dinner, we went out to the lobby to watch the sun set behind the mountains.  There was a very good pianist there, noodling around in a George Winston manner.  A staff person carried around a tray of cookies, without charge.  There are sofas, with upholstery in American Indian patterns, and two huge corner fireplaces.  But we were feeling tired after a long day, and went back to our simple but comfortable room.