Four days under the Tetons and we never went up
Coming south out of Yellowstone the timber runs out and the range is there, all of it at once, with nothing standing in front of it. No foothills. No long green rise to get you ready for the thing. Sage, a fence line, and then rock going straight up out of flat ground.
That is the fault doing it. NPS says a typical earthquake on the Teton fault moves the ground about ten feet, two to three feet up on the range side and four to six feet down on the valley side. The half of it in the windshield is the smaller half. I drove the rest of the way in at about fifty, and Erika had the map open on her knees the whole time.
We stayed four days and we never went up. Not one switchback into the canyons, no day above the treeline. Everything we did, we did on the floor.
The Jenny Lake lot was full at eight thirty in the morning, which is the kind of fact that tells you what park you are in. We walked it. Around the south end and up the far shore to Hidden Falls, a hundred-foot cascade coming down Cascade Creek, which is 4.9 miles round trip if you do the whole thing on your feet. We did not do the whole thing on our feet. We bought one-way tickets on the boat shuttle at the west dock and rode back across, which takes about two miles off the day.
The next day we did not drive anywhere at all. Colter Bay sits on the shore of Jackson Lake in the north of the park. We got the bikes down off the rack and rode the loops for most of the morning with no destination. The beach there is not sand. It is rock, graded down small, and it runs a long way out into the water. Little worked it on her knees for an hour and came back with nine rocks and wanted a name for every one of them. We ate pizza. One night that week we sat down at The Peaks Restaurant at Signal Mountain Lodge, where there is a burrata flatbread. Rain came in the middle of the afternoon and we went into the visitor center as it started.
Inside there is a room of work called Made by Hand, and a man had a folding table set up with a cash box on it. Forged blades, a box of elk antler at his feet cut into handle stock with the sawn ends still bright, and flutes laid out on a cloth in three lengths. He was working while he sold, fitting a scale to a tang, looking up when somebody asked a price. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and he drove up from Oklahoma. Cherokee homeland is the southern Appalachians, and the reason there is a Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma at all is that the United States forced the removal. This valley is Eastern Shoshone, Shoshone-Bannock, Apsáalooke, Blackfeet, Gros Ventre, Cheyenne, Lakota and Niimiipuu homeland. Erika bought a flute. He wrapped it in newspaper and went back to the antler.
Down at Moose there is a film about migration. We sat through it twice, once because we walked in partway. Big and Little finished the Junior Ranger booklets and a ranger swore them in at the desk.
We found the moose on the way back, standing in willows off the road with a lot of vehicles already stopped and everybody being reasonably good about it. Bull, dark, up to the hocks in wet ground, taking willow tips and not hurrying. NPS asks for twenty-five yards from anything that is not a bear or a wolf, and twenty-five yards is closer than it sounds when the animal is that size. He fed for a while. Then he put his head up and looked at the road, which is a thing that stops all the talking in a line of cars.
On the last morning we drove down to the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve. The parking is small on purpose, to hold down the number of people on the ground, and NPS says it is often full from before eight in the morning until five.
We never got on the trail to Phelps Lake. We went into the Preserve Center and stayed there.
It is the best building we have walked into since we left home. Low, long, timber, sited so it does not announce itself from the lot, and the first LEED platinum building in the National Park System, which is the top of that scale. The exhibits are the opposite of a wall of text. NPS calls them sensory exhibits and that is the honest word for them: they are built for your ears and your hands before your eyes, and they are strung along a poem by Terry Tempest Williams. Then the soundscape room, where you sit down in low light and the valley plays around you, wind, water, elk, geese, thunder coming up and going over, the seasons turning while you sit still. Big listened with his eyes shut. Little leaned into my arm and stayed there. Nobody hurried anybody out.
Behind the gate is a ranch that was taken apart on purpose. Thirty buildings, the roads and the utilities, all pulled out between 2004 and 2007 and the ground put back, and the last 1,106 acres handed to the park that November. The buildings were not knocked down. About half went to a new family place outside the park and the rest were given to the Park Service, and NPS says the cabins are working around the park now as housing, warehouses and work centers.
In 1927 John D. Rockefeller Jr. agreed to buy as much as 114,170 acres of this valley for $1,397,000. Horace Albright at the Park Service wanted the buyer and the purpose kept quiet so the price would not climb, so the buying went through a front called the Snake River Land Company, and the Jackson banker hired to do it was not told what it was for. He was against a park himself. The people who sold found out whose money it had been in 1930, after all of it was bought. One man entitled to his ground never got the paper for it. The Jackson Hole historian Robert Righter says the secrecy laid a foundation of mistrust between the town and the family that outlasted the buying.
Congress would not take the gift for over a decade, so in 1943 Roosevelt went around them and made 221,000 acres of it a national monument. The 1950 act that settled the fight, and that made the park we had been driving through all week, carries a line barring any further national park or monument in Wyoming without an act of Congress. Both halves of it are still on the books, and the monument half sits inside the Antiquities Act, with one state’s name in it and no other’s.
The JY was the piece they kept. Rockefeller bought it in 1932 meaning to hand it to the park and then did not, and the family held it on Phelps Lake for seventy-five years. Righter’s reading is that he would have given it away with the rest in 1949, except that his son Laurance had honeymooned there and was too fond of it. It went last.
We came out squinting and drove the Moose-Wilson Road north with the windows down, and never did set foot on the trail.
That night we were in a hotel with a pool. Chlorine, a ceiling, a rope of blue floats across the middle, the least wild water in Wyoming, and both of them in it inside four minutes. Big and Little played Marco Polo, tag, and enjoyed swapping between the pool and hot tub. A well earned break. Onwards!
Where this happened: Grand Teton National Park