This is what the road over Teton Pass looked like in the early 1900s

Tue, 7/29/08

Grand Teton National Park, WY: We decided to go back into Jackson today because I wanted to go over Teton Pass—where John Colter crossed the Tetons—and you have to go through Jackson to get there. Stopped at a drug store and dropped off my prescription. The drive over the pass was quite spectacular. Of course Colter did it in the dead of winter. The mountains were covered with a thick conifer forest all the way to the top. We drove to Victor, Idaho, had lunch at this cute little place (the Grumpy Goat, or something) and then headed back. At the pass we stopped to take a picture and read some of the historic information. A young guy approached us to see if he could catch a ride to Jackson. He rode up the pass on his bike and had 3 flat tires. The third one he couldn’t fix. I was going to frisk him before we let him in the truck, but he had so much spandex on there’s no way he could conceal anything. So we put his bike in the back of the truck and off we go. He’s the resident manager at one of the resort hotels in Jackson. Told us he could get us a good rate if we wanted. Nice guy. We dropped him at his car and then we decided to drive over to Alpine. Our guide on our float trip lives in Alpine. It’s about 50 miles from the moose entrance to Teton National Park and he drives it twice a day. He does it in about an hour. He calls it the Alpine 500. This was a beautiful drive along the Snake River all the way. The river is absolutely beautiful—a wonderful blue color contrasting with the white rapids. And it goes through some impressive canyons. In Alpine we stopped and got something to drink and I took over driving. Back to Jackson and picked up my prescription and then drove back to the park. On the way back we took a dirt road off the park road down to Schwabacker’s Landing. The road goes down from a high plateau of sage brush to a little stream—probably a tributary of the Snake. We walked along the stream until we came to a beaver dam and quite a large pond. There were a couple of beaver lodges. We saw a beaver swimming around and watched him for a while. Drove back and stopped at Jackson Lodge to have a drink on their deck. Everyone must have had the same idea because there were no tables available outside, so we left and went back to our campground. It was 90 in Jackson. Probably 80s here. Clouding up tonight.