Grand Teton National Park was just a short drive from Jacson hole, in fact, the Jackson Hole airport appear to be on the edge of National Park land. For our visit, we had to deal with three challenges that impacted visibility of the nearby mountains: smoke from nearby wildfires; heavy rain; low clouds. In fact, during our stay in the park, we had our first day of almost nonstop rain. So while its disappointing, we have to be thankful for our good fortune so far, and recognize that the at-times heavy rain will help with the wildfire situation.
We did not yet get to see much wildlife, but we are still counting on that getting solved once we are in Yellowstone National Park, our next stop.
What is special about Grand Teton National Park is that it follows a tectonic plate fault line, as a resut of which on one side, there are these tall jagged “young” mountains, and then, without the transition of any foothills, on the other side there is this flat valley (the part of the park we drive on). Due to weather conditions, we did not do any hikes, but we did drive the entirety of the park, and stopped at all the pullouts that had information panels (memory jogger for Stephanie back when we toured Australia together). The key one worth pointing out is that there are three Teton mountains, Grand Teton at 13,775 ft, as well as Middle Teton and South Teton with somewhat lower peaks. Since the whole range extends 40 miles, there are of course other named mountains.
