Day Nineteen: Grand Teton National Park

We had another early start today and one that felt more difficult that usual because we hadn't had a very good night's sleep. The shed that we're staying in is supposed to have air-conditioning and the unit was working at the point at which we checked in yesterday. But at some point during the evening, we unexpectedly lost power to all the sockets on the side of the room where the air-con was located. So it was a rather hot and sticky night!

After we'd had breakfast and I'd sent a message to the Airbnb host to explain our problem, we hit the road and began driving in the direction of Grand Teton National Park. Dubois, where we are staying, isn't really the logical choice of location for visiting this national park, because the entrance station was a drive of about 70 miles away. Most people who visit the park stay in the much nearer town of Jackson. But when I was researching accommodation for the holiday, hotel rooms in Jackson seemed ridiculously expensive (300 per night kind of expensive!) so we decided it was worth staying further away to save some money.

It was a lovely drive in the morning sunshine and we'd arrived at the Moran entrance station to Grand Teton by around 8am. This is the fifth national park which we've got into now with our 'America the Beautiful' pass, so it definitely feels like we've got value

We were entering through the less popular gate to the park, being the one furthest from the town of Jackson, and so the first viewpoints we drove to were still pretty quiet, even though we hadn't arrived at the crack of dawn. We also had the advantage of starting with an absolutely stunning viewpoint known as Oxbow Bend Overlook.

The bend is in the Snake River, which flows through the park.  The mountain reflected in the water is Mount Moran, one of the major peaks in the Teton Range.

What a beautiful place! We felt like we might struggle to beat this initial view for the rest of the day.

After Oxbow Bend, the road through the park took us alongside Jackson Lake, one of several lakes within the national park.  The view here was pretty beautiful too  

The Snake River is dammed here, to provide water storage for irrigation of potatoes in Idaho, the state we'll be heading to tomorrow.

The aim for today was to do a scenic driving tour of Grand Teton rather than embark on any long hikes. Unlike in Rocky Mountain National Park, there is a population of grizzly bears here and we weren't keen to meet any of them! With that in mind, our next activity was to drive to the top of a peak called Signal Mountain.

There were some good views from here down to the plain below us. I could imagine that in times gone by there would have been bison roaming across this!

We also got a glimpse of Snake River in the distance.

After Signal Mountain, we continued driving along the main road through the park, which took us to a series of viewpoints.

At a stop called Mount Moran Turnout, we had a great view of that mountain. An info board explained that the snow we could see on the mountain was a glacier. The picture on the info board showed that there had once been considerably more glacier than was left today.

Some of the other peaks which we could see in the distance had glaciers too.

The road curved road and took us to a car park near a lake called String Lake.

Again it was really beautiful and it looked like there were some interesting short hikes here. But we decided against venturing into the woods, just in case we encountered any large wildlife. So far we'd mainly just seen chipmunks  

Instead we drove out of the park to the town of Jackson to get some lunch.

Walking around Jackson felt a bit like being in the Wild West!

There were some really pretty wooden buildings here, though it was hard to take good photos because there were cars everywhere.

I loved this pretty little wooden church  

We found a pizza restaurant where the pizza was loads better than the Pizza Hut experience we'd had in South Dakota the other day. We were just coming out of the restaurant and making our way back to where we'd parked the car, when Tim saw this...

We're used to finding Esperanto signs all over Europe but we hadn't expected to find one in the USA  Having googled it, it turns out that it's a film about mountain biking  

After lunch we drove back into the national park. The beauty of having the pass is that we can enter and exit as many times as we want. Our aim was to visit a part of the park known as Jenny Lake.

We'd actually tried to park here before lunch and failed, despite the fact that there is an enormous car park. This is the most popular and most visited part of the park and there was fierce competition for spaces! Things had quietened down a bit after lunch; we still couldn't get a spot in the car park, but we managed to park by the side of the road a few minutes' walk away.

I was keen to see why this was the most popular part of the park, so we made our way straight down to the shore of Jenny Lake.

It was pleasant, but I wouldn't say it was more impressive than any of the locations we'd already visited today.

We concluded that it's probably just so popular because there's a visitor centre here and the lake is only a very short walk from the car park. People seemed to have come here just to eat ice-cream and stroll around  

We jumped back in the car and set off towards the next viewpoint on my list.

This was a place called Mormon Row, which was settled by Mormons in the 1890s. There are some historical Mormon barns here.

We found the barns to be of limited interest, but the view back towards the Teton mountains was great  

The next viewpoint was much more impressive: Schwabacher Landing.

The combination of the mountains and the river was really beautiful; I loved it here

Our final viewpoint for the afternoon was called Snake River Overlook.

This one was really gorgeous too  

After this one we had a 70 mile drive back to our shed. I'd been exchanging messages with the owner once we managed to get a phone signal in Jackson and she confirmed that something had tripped and she'd get it sorted out for us. I was very happy when we finally got back to find that the air-conditioning unit was indeed working again. Tonight should be much cooler