June 18th - Grand Teton - Jenny Lake, Wyoming

This was the day we had set aside to make a circuit hike in Grand Teton, and we finally settled on a loop around Jenny Lake with a side trip up to the Hidden Falls. These falls lie a short distance up a canyon from the lake shore and were said to be quite beautiful. We drove over to the trailhead for String Lake and then followed a trail beside a river for about 3/10ths of a mile down to the lake. This stretch of the river had some quite impressive cascades before opening out onto a very nice view of the lake.

The first part of the walk over to the Hidden Falls area was quite level and easy going; we enjoyed views of the deep blue lake to our left and occasional views of the snow-capped Tetons getting ever closer to us on our right. The path was along a nice wooded trail and very picturesque and peaceful.

The easy going ended when we took a trail branch uphill to get to Inspiration Point. I had by this time given up hope of seeing a moose in the wild, but what happened next just goes to show that you should never lose hope. We were getting near the top of this section when a family coming down said that they had seen a bull moose with a big rack of antlers under the trees about 200 yards up the trail. I looked and looked as we struggled up the last section but could not find a trace of him. But finally when we took a break and I looked back down the hill I saw a Bullwinkle Moose type of silhouette thru the trees—we had, in fact, finally found him! It was clear why we hadn’t noticed him—he was lying down and blended in with the tree shadows almost perfectly. We watched him long enough to see him twitch his ears, look around lazily at us, and apparently chew his cud—then we continued up the mountain to Inspiration Point.

I don’t know how inspiring Inspiration Point is, but it certainly is a grand, panoramic view of Jenny Lake and the Teton mountains just beside it. After not seeing anyone for the last hour of walking, we were suddenly surrounded by a bunch of folks who had taken the ferry across the lake, which rather disturbed the solitary aspect of our enjoying nature. The second pest was the begging chipmunks which have obviously been fed by the tourists and came running around our legs hoping for a handout; that also interfered with the inspiration process a bit.

We continued on the trail down hill to the base of the falls, where we encountered a continuous stream of people. I particularly enjoyed the family having a snack of beef jerky right beside a sign that warned everyone to not eat food due to grizzly bear visitations of the falls area—they were either ignorant or oblivious, I’m not sure which. But surely they rank in a class with the other dolts who feed bears, chipmunks, etc. The falls, however, were really spectacular and well worth a visit. We snapped a few pictures and then continued on our way around the lake.

As soon as we turned onto the upper lakeside trail we were totally alone again and didn’t see another person until we rejoined the main trail a couple miles later near the campground. The solitude was rather soothing after the crowds of people at the falls, but the converse of this nice solitude was that we were just that much more likely to accidentally surprise a grizzly bear, which we really didn’t want to do. I wouldn’t have worried so much except that there was really no sign anyone else had walked that way that morning and I kept seeing fresh bear scat. So we tried singing and clapping our hands while walking, which led to the discovery that singing while walking uphill at 7000 feet altitude just gets you completely out of breath! After a couple of vain attempts to keep up singing and climbing, I settled for clapping my hands since I could still do that and breathe heavily on the up hill slopes. Next time, as silly as it sounds, I will buy and wear some “bear bells” for these walks—it’s a lot less work than singing or clapping your hands.

We had been walking 3 hours by the time we hit the campground and were mighty tired and thirsty. We had hoped for a café, restaurant, or whatever but could only find a little grocery store. So I bought a 1-liter bottle of Coke with a roast beef sandwich and Monika bought a variety of snacks that we shared while sitting on the veranda in front. We were tired so we lingered an hour or so with our meal and then refilled our water bottle and continued back around the lake.

The way back around gave us more great views of the mountains with the lake as a foreground. We were really happy that this part of the trail was basically flat, but these 3 miles still took us another hour and a half, and we were happy to see the stream at the head of the lake again. By this time Monika was already starting the second phase of getting tired—I have my own 3-stage system for classifying how tired a person is. The first stage is when you get out of breath and say to yourself “Gee, I’m really tired!” The second stage I call the “dragging your feet” stage—you get too tired to fully lift up your legs as you walk and you start stumbling over tiny rocks or tree roots that you would normally step over without effort. The third stage I call the “jelly leg” stage—the leg muscles start quivering uncontrollably and get out of control unless you really concentrate on holding your leg steady with each step. I think “jelly leg” is pretty close to “total collapse”, so I try to rest a bit when we hit that stage to avoid a disastrous fall or something similar.

Monika was clearly dragging her feet by this time, but she didn’t fall, thank goodness. We stopped to hydrate and finished up a second bottle of water in addition to the liter of Coke that we had shared for lunch. The trail finally returned to the parking lot by going up the other side of the stream, which gave us different views of the cascades than we had had that morning. Then we saw our faithful truck (and its soft seats!), for which we were profoundly grateful. We crawled into the truck and cranked up the air conditioning while we drove back to the Colter Bay area. On the way home, a coyote crossed the street and then came to rest under a tree. Luckily we still had a few pictures left.

At Colter Bay we went back to the Visitor Center with the Indian Art Museum to download the camera pictures. They had a spare outlet beside a comfortable bench that we had found on our previous visit and I needed it to run the computer. The laptop had finally run out of power even though we had conserved the batteries as much as possible during the last week of camping by just using it to download pictures—no writing. The museum folks didn’t seem to mind us sitting there and quietly using their electricity, which was nice of them.

We also took part in a tour of the museum that happened to start while we were there (serendipity strikes again!). During the tour we learned that it had 800 displayed pieces and was the donated collection of one man who had purchased pieces representing Native American cultures from roughly 1850 to 1925. We followed the museum tour and then went across the street to buy lunch at a café where we continued to recharge the computer while we ate—we found one of the booths had an outlet underneath it! That way I could use the computer later that evening to keep writing in the journal while Monika played the dulcimer, which was a very pleasant way to spend our last night in Grand Teton National Park.