Answer the questions. Each one tells you why. Big and Little wrote them.
Park Quiz
Question 1 of 5
The Teton fault moves in earthquakes. Which moves more, the mountains going up or the valley going down?
The National Park Service says the fault moves about 10 feet in a typical earthquake: two to three feet up on the mountain side and four to six feet down on the valley side. The valley has dropped roughly twice as far as the range has risen. Most of that wall you see is the valley falling away, not the peaks climbing.
The Teton Range is one of the youngest mountain ranges in the Rockies. How old is the rock it is built from?
The range has been lifting for less than 10 million years, which is young next to the rest of the Rocky Mountains at 50 to 80 million years old. But the gneiss the peaks are made of is about 2.7 billion years old. Young mountains, old rock.
Jackson Lake is the largest lake in the park. What is unusual about it?
The National Park Service calls Jackson Lake a natural lake raised by a 39-foot tall man-made dam. The water it holds back is sent to farms in Idaho, an arrangement older than the park boundary on the map today.
Jenny Lake carries the name of a real person. Who was she?
Jenny was Shoshone, and married to a British trapper named Richard "Beaver Dick" Leigh. The two assisted the 1872 Hayden expedition, he as their guide and she with camp logistics, and the survey named Jenny Lake and Leigh Lake for them.
A whole hillside of aspen turns yellow on the same day. Why?
The National Park Service puts it plainly: the trees in a big aspen stand are connected under the ground by spreading root systems, are all one organism, and so they all change color at the same time.