USRT15 #8--Tetons on My Birthday

We picked up Dan in Salt Lake City, five days after leaving him behind in Virginia, and we stayed in Idaho with friends on my birthday. My one birthday wish was to go to the Tetons, and so on a Monday morning we drove into Wyoming. We checked in at the visitor center, shopping a bit for a birthday memento, and then we headed out to see the craggy peaks of these beautiful mountains.

Our one hike to Hidden Falls around the backside of Jenny Lake was a good little taste.

I tried over and over to capture the texture of the talus on the slopes and the size of trees on the peaks. Unlike Yosemite where the highest spots seem entirely unreachable, the Tetons seem deceptively accessible.

Of all of A's dresses, she chose to wear my favorite so I asked her over and over to hop into photos of the day. 

It was near this point that we spotted a mama bear and her two cubs. We stayed close to the pack of twenty people who were stopped on the trail watching them as they slowly lumbered on the slope beside us.

On our next trip we will take canoes onto String Lake and Jenny Lake in addition to adding a couple hikes, but on this trip we were sufficiently chilly by the end of the day.

We stopped at the Cathedral Group Pull-out on our way out of the park that day. Don't tell the kids I had them do ten jump photos because I wanted to wear them out just a little more--there wasn't something wrong with my camera as I might have let them to believe. On each jump I repositioned myself just a little bit trying to catch the right angle of the mountains. The camera still couldn't capture how majestic the Grand is flanked by Teewinot Mountain and Mt. Owens at its side.

At this point of the road trip I embraced the taste-test aspect of this road trip. These mountains have been here a long time, I still tell myself. I don't know when I'll get back to any of these places, but they are too beautiful for me to be kept away.