After saying goodbye to our Dutch neighbours, we drove on to Jenny Lake inside the Grand Teton NP. The weather was good and the park very busy. If this is the low season, then I wonder how full it will be on the trails around the lake in the main season. Most of the campsites and facilities at the lake are already closed down. The Teton range is formed by one of the oldest rocks in the world. Here the continental plates glide over each other and along a hinge fault, the Tetons are pushed up while the valley with the lake and the Snake river are sinking. They are filled up by the erosion of the Tetons. All along the lake you see many different rocks varying from different colours of igneous rocks to metamorphic ocean floor settlements. We did a short 4 km walk along the wooded lakeshore. There were many others doing the same hike. We drove out of the park into the State park across the road. After some 10 km winding through lovely yellow prairie land shimmering in the sun we arrived at the state park campsite. Because it is outside the season there was no entrance fee. The location could not have been better, situated at a lake in between the mountains. The slopes were coloured by batches of yellow and red trees (autumn colour).
The nights are getting colder (also as we were above 2000m high). We woke up with frost on the front window but the sunlight in the morning warmed up the camper once it had climbed over the mountain. We drove back to the park to visit the Information centre and then drove on to Jackson. This town is clearly an outdoor oriented town. On the hills behind the town you can see the ski lifts and in town the hotels and lodges for visiting the Tetons in the summer and skiing in the winter. We stocked up on our groceries and continued our way down south out of Wyoming and into Idaho. The road is good. It runs through wide high altitude valleys (1700 -2300 m) where you see grass farming and cattle grazing. From one valley to the other you climb up over the watershed of around 2700 m to drop down into the next valley. In the evening we turned off onto a small side road towards the Minnetonka Caves where again we found a free state campground. This time on a river stream with lovely coloured hills on either side. The narrow valley did not allow the evening and morning sun to heat up the camper. It was 5 deg inside in the morning.
Today we drove some 296 km further south taking a detour through the mountains. Although Hwy 150 is a tourist road winding through the mountain, it was quite busy. Many travellers take advantage of the sunny weather to take the high road (pass at 3200 m) before it is closed for the winter. Instead of entering Salt Lake City and since it was a warm sunny day, we decided stop earlier and camped at another State park campsite on Deer Lake. Not a free campsite, but it did offer nice sunny and shaded campsites as well as warm showers.
Rudy Welling's Travels 