Saturday, September 10, 2011

Sep 10 – Grand Teton National Park

Today we did a long 400 km loop drive through Grand Teton National Park. Grand Teton is “just” south of Yellowstone. It took us 2 1/2 hours to get there due to the low speed limits in the parks.

The pictures will be a bit dark today. Somehow the camera got set to underexpose everything. I attempted to fix it in Photoshop but I am not very good with it.

In the park you drive along this vast flat area with the wall of the Teton Mountains just to the west. Here is our first view from the highway across Jackson Lake.

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Getting closer.

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We stopped at the Lake Jenny visitor’s center. It’s not the right spelling but Jennie had to get a “Lake Jenny” water bottle.

We discovered that for $10 you could get a 7 minute boat ride across the lake and then hike 1/2 mile to a waterfall and then another 1/2 mile to an observation point. The view from across Lake Jenny.

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They had two boats going back and forth constantly which made of a very crowded hike and on top of that again we had the problem of the boat ride causing everyone to start at once and with this short a hike there is no chance to spread out.

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Hidden Falls was nice but I heard someone say that the water flow was very low compared to when he was here before.

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The climb up to the observation point was something else. It looked like they blasted it out of the cliff side. More fun times for Jennie.

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Another load heading in.

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You can see a person in red, far above us, on the path about 1/3 down in the picture below.

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The view back out over the lake to the vast plain.

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Up the mountain behind us.

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Jennie always likes to check out the local plants.

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I couldn't resist taking this one of the silhouetted dead tree.

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After an equally fun climb down it was back on the boat to the car and onwards south.

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Along the way we got stopped for a bit as part of the road was being used for a bike race. The timing clock read over 9 /12 hours when we went by. That’s a long way at that altitude and in the heat. We saw these two cheering the riders on.

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We also passed by Jackson Hole Ski Resort.

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We exited the park at the south end and then headed west up over Teton Pass. The drive up is pretty extreme at a 10% grade for 3 miles. The CRV had trouble even going 40 mph. The steepest I have seen anywhere else is 6% and even on that they have truck warnings about brakes. This is the kind of hill I worry about running into when in the RV.

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On the other side we descended down in to Idaho for our trip back north. Two hours of endless wheat fields.

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With the Tetons off in the distance to the east.

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Mostly far off in the distance.

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We left the RV at 8:30 am and got back at 6:30 pm. Needless to say we had a quick “dinner” out at Arby's and then back to the RV to rest.

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