Sojourns: Volume Two--The Tetons

(Not much going on in February for a schoolteacher in Oregon. So I'll write about other times, the quarter of the year when I don't have to show up to work. This will be a multi-part series.)

The Teton Range is a jagged spine that juts out from the Wyoming plains like a tablesaw blade. I went there, two summers ago, and hiked through two glacial canyons with my wife and a buddy of mine. We spent three days in those mountains.

I've been to that part of Wyoming a few times before. In Yellowstone, I worked in a fire camp, visited with my family, and went on part of my honeymoon. I'd seen the Tetons, but only from a car on short day trips. This time, I vowed, I would live out of a backpack and see things most tourists don't. I brought my bear spray--a 12-oz. canister that works like mace, only it's designed to fend off grizzly bears. My buddy got the time off work. My wife is resilient, and willing. We penciled in the date, made the reservations through the ranger station, and set off.

It's a long drive through barren parts of Eastern Oregon and Idaho, this passage to Wyoming. My buddy and I once bought white, ten-gallon cowboy hats in Canada, and we wore them the whole way, of course. Stayed a night in Pocatello. Ate food at truckstops. Chased the American Dream.

After passing the horrible, kitschy "western town" of Jackson, WY (think Sisters, OR, but worse), we set up basecamp on the dry, sagebrush flats of the Gros Ventre River Valley. We listened to a ranger campfire talk that night, under wide-open western skies. The ranger said that the seeds chipmunks collect in the mountains impact grizzly bears' eating habits, and that we are all connected in a great wheel of life. Not a quarter-mile away, in the dark, a great herd of buffalo snorted and shuffled and bedded down for the night. Soon, we did too.

The next morning, we stuffed our tents into our backpacks and drove, in the bright sunshine, to the huge mountain range that filled the entire western skyline. The Teton Range, somehow, has no foothills, so the 7,000 foot jump from our our basecamp to the summit of the Grand is jarring, an imposing wall of granite and ice. We picked up our backcountry permits at the Jenny Lake ranger station. The ranger was impressed at our route--a three-day loop through the Paintbrush and Cascade Canyons via Holly Lake, the Paintbrush Divide, and Lake Solitude--and told us to have a good time. We borrowed the bear canisters, those Nalgene-esque plastic containers for our food. I attached the bear spray to my belt, and we were ready to go.

I've always imagined myself staring down a huge grizzly bear on a mountain trail, wife and buddy hiding behind me. I would coolly snap the bear spray out of the holster, pull the pin, and in an acidic fog of pepper and chemicals, let the bear have it. This didn't happen on our trip to the Tetons. We did, however, encounter our share of crazy mountain animals. The first was a bull elk, feeding in a patch of wildflowers high up on a rocky slope, across the canyon from our trail. The next was cow elk, bedded down and surprised at our presence, about twenty feet away. Alarmed, I almost let her have it with the bear spray. Near the top of the Paintbrush Divide, we saw a number of marmots and pikas. That's right, marmots and pikas. On day three, we saw what looked like a pair of skis on someone's shoulder coming at us from behind a bush around a bend in the trail. The "skis" turned out to be antlers from a bull moose. We all did a little dance and scattered while the seven-foot ungulate crashed though the underbrush. An hour later, another bull moose, this time across a small river. The ranger was right: the great wheel of life was intact.

I recommend a trip like this. It's satisfying to hike from dense forest to wildflower meadows to rocks and snow. We camped by a beautiful lake, fed by glaciers, and a clear, cold mountain spring. The top of Paintbrush Divide (elevation 10,700 feet) was a great milestone, like the floor of the Grand Canyon in reverse--it was all downhill after that point. Importantly, the Divide separated two unique glacier valleys, and the hike down was as picturesque and unique as the hike up. We felt alive when we huddled in our tents during a high-elevation thunderstorm. The air, the flowers, the animals, the ice, the rocks, the long traverses over glaciers--the hike was a reconnection with the American West and a reaffirmation of those great passages from Thoreau and Emerson.

At the end of the trip, after 19 miles of hiking and almost 4,000 feet of elevation change, it felt good to get in the car and drive up to Yellowstone. We had some local microbrews, walked on a boardwalk, looked at geothermal features. Though we were only there for a day, we could tell that Yellowstone is another great adventure--some 98 percent of visitors stay close to their cars and yet the backpacking trails extend for miles. I hear Glacier National Park is pretty good, too. Same with Kings Canyon and Sequoia. And Zion. And Big Bend, down in Texas. I heard the Sawtooths in Idaho are nice. Banff is supposed to be the real deal. And Bryce Canyon. And North Cascades. And Moab. And Yosemite. There's a trail around Tahoe, I heard.

I'm endlessly happy that my job has a summer vacation.