Grand Teton National Park

We made an early exit from Dinosaur National Monument because we were too hot and headed up to Grand Teton National Park.  The first day there we took a ranger-guided walk up to Taggert Lake (one of the lakes at the base of the Tetons in a glacial moraine).  The ranger spent a lot of time talking about interconnections in the park, beginning with the desire to protect the park from the growing "dude" ranch movement in the 1920's (dudes were Easterners who came out and were willing to pay to help out on the played out ranches).  We learned about the sapsuckers who make little lines on aspen trees and are followed by hummingbirds who get insects from the holes to feed their newborns, to
bears who scrape the bark from the bottom up to eat the cambium, to a kind of sagebrush that has a deep tap root which pulls water to the surface which is dispersed through the shallow surface roots to other grasses.  Taggert Lake, with Grand Teton in the background, is beautiful.  Bob, Joe and Vera Wiatt had purchased two-day Wyoming fishing licenses and decided to do some serious fishing in the Snake River.  We scouted out various spots on our way home to Colter Bay.










                   The classis Grand Teton skyline.













While they went fishing (they left early in the morning and came back to deliver me to a trailhead by around 10 a.m.), I decided to do two serious hikes.  The first was to Lake of the Crags in Hanging Canyon.  It was advertised as steep (2,700' elevation gain in two miles).  I rode the boat across Jenny Lake and started hiking.  They were not kidding that it was steep.  I eventually quit about 400' short of the lake as the grade was about 60% and I knew I would have to go back down the same steep slope.  The canyon is the notch in this picture.  It was a hike with few other people (I met six), and I carried my bear spray and yelled every time I couldn't see ahead.
The next day I decided to hike up Paintbrush Canyon (13.2 miles to Holly Lake).  I only had about 5 1/2 hours.  The hike started beside String Lake (basically a widening of the river going into Jenny Lake) and then headed up.  It too gained 2,500', but over a longer distance.  It was a gorgeous hike once I got out from in front of the horse string that I was trying to out-hike.






In contrast to the hike up Hanging Canyon where I was chasing the clouds, this day was gorgeous and sunny.  After going through the lodgepole pine forest, it eventually broke out into Alpine tundra and kept heading up.









Here you can see Leigh Lake with Jackson Lake in the background.  I hiked for over half the time I had, make it within about .4 miles of Holly Lake and turned around and hoofed it back down to hook up with the fisher-people.  Joe managed to catch a huge, yummy Lake Trout and a small brook trout.  Vera caught a whitefish and all enjoyed themselves.







As we headed towards Yellowstone N.P., we stopped at Huckleberry Hot Springs in the John D. Rockefeller Memorial Parkway which connects Yellowstone and Grand Teton.  It used to be a developed hot spring resort, but when the National Park Service took over the land it became worried about amoebic meningitis and stopped advertising the hot springs.  We went into the spring here anyway.  It was the perfect temperature, we were totally alone, it was silent, and it soaked away two strenuous days of hiking.  If we had looked a little further, we would have found deeper and warmer pools farther on, but it was perfect anyway.