The Grand Tetons

Wanted to test an entry in a Diary Circle, so this one will go into Travel and Adventures.

DiaryMistress and I recently traveled to Jackson Hole, Wyoming and to Yellowstone for a few days. Neither of us had been to Jackson before, although she had been to Yellowstone as a teenager.

The picture above is taken overlooking Jenny Lake, looking into the canyon between Grand Teton on the left and Mt. St. John on the right. It was an amazing view, and made me want to hike up into that canyon, past Storm Point which is the shoulder on the side of St. John.

The whole area was amazing – the mountains are gorgeous. We came back with literally hundreds of pictures.

The picture above is of Mount Moran, which is at the northern end of the Tetons. Bisecting the face of Moran is Skillet Glacier, which is an active glacier. We both thought this was one of the most fascinating mountains.

It was cloudy the day we took these pictures, but the next day was sunny and clear, so we of course had to take all of the pictures all over again, with a sunny perspective!

We saw quite a bit of wildlife, but honestly would have liked to see more – but we did see:

• a mother black bear and her cubs (pretty close up)
• a man and lady moose
• a big elk with very large rack (think we saw the same one twice)
• a herd(!) of bison
• a smaller group of antelope (from so far away that they were kind of big dots)
• a mother grizzly and her cubs (from so so far away that they really were just bear-shaped dots)

One of our favorite things, though, was the magpies – we are both fans of corvids (some other time we will talk about our propensity for finding ravens in the places we travel to), and the magpies were just wonderful with their coloring and obvious corvid smartness.

Last picture – we spent some time walking the (mostly) dry creek bed of a creek, and came across several of these large volcanic rocks. Just a reminder that the whole place is a huge caldera that sits on top of a supervolcano.