The Trip – Part 3: We head down to the Tetons
Even though it was only mid-September, because of the high elevation in Yellowstone the nights were already getting quite chilly. It even snowed one night. We didn’t have winter sleeping bags so we wore long underwear for pajamas and placed our winter coats on top to act as a quilt. With it getting dark earlier we often used our Coleman lantern in the tent for reading or writing before we went to sleep. This is when I usually wrote in my now-misplaced journal. In addition to light, the lantern also took some of the chill and dampness out of the tent.
After about two weeks we decided it was time to move on so we drove to Grand Teton National Park. This is just south of Yellowstone. The two parks are connected by the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Memorial Parkway and form a nice long stretch of wilderness. Our first stop was in Colter Bay Village. This is a rather popular tourist area that includes pretty much anything you need, a Visitor Center, store, marina, cabins, campground, and so on and so forth.
Colter Bay is not the kind of location that we normally chose for camping but we could find showers and a laundromat here, things we had not had since we left Madison. I don’t recall how much they charged for showers but I certainly used my share of hot water. We encountered some cold wet days so it was also good to spend time in the cafeteria drinking coffee and keeping warm. Most of the time the place was not crowded so the waitress said she didn’t mind if we just hung out for a while.
When the weather cleared up we headed down to Jenny Lake campground. This was a nice spot because the campground was rustic and they didn’t allow large vehicles so most of the sites were taken up by other people in tents, pickups, or vans. In other words, mostly other young bums like ourselves. Jenny Lake is a beautiful small lake nestled at the foot of the Tetons. We spent one day hiking around the entire lake, approximately 7 miles. On the far side of the lake another trail heads up into Cascade Canyon. We walked a short way up that trail to look around but then continued to circumnavigate the lake.
While walking about the campground one day we noticed a bear trap located not far from our campsite. We asked a ranger about it and he said they had been trying to catch a troublesome bear but he had probably been trapped before and was too smart to enter their trap again. After dinner we gathered up our garbage and deposited it into a garbage can by an empty site several sites away from ours. Later that night as we lay in our tent we could hear garbage cans rattling as the bear made its rounds. We could hear it getting closer but it wandered past our site without incident. The next morning the bear trap remained unoccupied and several garbage cans were on their sides.
At the south end of the park near Moose Junction sits the Chapel of the Transfiguration, a church that’s not much more than a log cabin. It was constructed in 1925 and, instead of a stained-glass window, a clear window stands behind the altar and frames the mountain peaks in the background. The sky was blue, the mountains were dusted with white, and the leaves were turning gold. It was now late September and time for us to start thinking about how much longer we could remain in the mountains.
