Happy Nice Mall

When I arrived at my first campsite in Wyoming’s Teton Mountains, about 27 miles from the trail, I was expecting to be buried in my sleeping bag. My feet ached, my shoulders cramped from the weight of my bag, and although I spent most of the day hiking over 9,000 feet, I had not yet fully adjusted to the altitude. I quickly set up my tent, took off my boots, and climbed inside.

Still, instead of shaking my head, I looked out through the mesh screen and was enchanted by the view: Framed in the distance—as if arranged perfectly in a picture window—the imposing peak of the Grand Teton towering above the surrounding towers.

So began what felt like a five-act night play, the Tetons occupying center stage: clarity in the early evening, the dark glow of the sunset, the gradual emergence of the Milky Way, a saturated set of predawn tones, and finally, vibrant. streaks of light in the early morning.

A day ago, I went through overflowing parking lots and crowded boardwalks I make my way through Yellowstone National Park to the spectacular views of Grand Prismatic Spring and the geysers at Norris Basin.

But here, in the countryside, about 50 miles south, is John D. Rockefeller Jr., the main street that connects Yellowstone to the Teton Range. I was living in near solitude what Rockefeller was, away from the popular walks on Memorial Parkway. donated tens of thousands of acres To Grand Teton National Park – it was once described in a letter.

“The Teton Mountains are, in my humble opinion, the largest and most spectacular mountains I have ever seen,” he wrote. “Seen with the vast sage lining the valley or Lake Jackson and the marshes in the foreground, they present a picture of an ever-changing beauty that is incomparable to me.”

Miles by mile, the Teton Crest Trail is among the most scenic multi-day hikes to be found anywhere in America, tracing mountain passes, epic ridgelines, dense forests, glaciers, snow fields, endless mountain scenery, soaring peaks, glacier-carved canyons, and a fixed array. covers. wildflowers, breathtaking mountain lakes and a wealth of wildlife including deer, bighorn sheep, mule deer, marmot and pika, as well as grizzly and black bears.

Most hikers heed the National Park Service’s advice to wait to travel and complete the trail in four or five days. not more than two miles per hour.

In early August, a friend and I tried to complete it in three days.

Permits are required for overnight stays in the countryside of Grand Teton National Park, and securing campsites along Teton Crest Road is a competitive process. Because we missed the early booking window, we aimed for a first-come, first-served permit, which requires queuing at one of the park’s visitor centers at 6 a.m. the day before the walk — two hours before the office opens. (I was first in line but still only got one of our two preferred locations, which required playing around a bit with our hiking plans.)

There is another option though. Because the trail goes in and out of the national park, hikers who want to forego the permit process can instead camp (free of charge) on stretches of the trail that fall into the Bridger-Teton and Caribou-Targhee National Forests.

If you’ve ever seen a photo of the Tetons stretching north and south along Wyoming’s western edge, it was probably taken from one of the popular and easily accessible landscapes east of the mountains: Schwabacher Landing, Mormon Row, NS Snake River View, Oxbow Twist. Seen from an eastern vantage point, Grand Teton, the highest of the peaks, rises about a mile and a half above the adjacent plains. (The sudden rise of the Tetons seems particularly dramatic due to the lack of substantial skirts.)

The Teton Crest Trail, on the other hand, offers hikers a view of the peaks from a vantage point in the west – a sight only gained by climbing steep canyons or a series of challenging passes. On this less-trafficked side, the mountains offer a wide variety of landscapes, including the pristine isolation of Lake Solitude, scattered scree fields, and the eerie barren landscape surrounding the 10,400-foot Hurricane Pass.

Relative solitude is, of course, one of the trail’s other appeals. Grand Teton National Park welcomed 3.3 million visitors in 2020 and was ranked fifth in the country’s best list, ahead of the Grand Canyon. most visited national parks. Parts of the park, including the once little-known Delta Lake, were so flooded by the ever-growing crowds that they helped spawn. campaigns against geotagging their locations in photos shared on social media.

Given its remoteness and limits of available permits, Teton Crest Trail, by contrast, is well insulated from the threat of overcrowding. As expected, we encountered only a handful of other hikers on the southern portions of the trail. (We started from the Phillips Pass Trail, but some hikers prefer to cut a few miles—and several thousand feet of elevation gain—from Teton Village using a streetcar or gondola.) Just near the north end of our route, at Paintbrush Canyon, popular with day hikers. The path started to feel cramped even from afar.

Fittingly, my hiking buddy Darius Nabors and I enjoyed the calmest moment of the trip at Lake Solitude, which we reached just before sunrise on our third day. Sitting on a rocky peninsula jutting into the lake, we silently watched the sun rise above the surrounding hills and slowly fill the basin around us with light.

According to our back-of-the-envelope calculation, this is a scene that perhaps only a hundred people witness each year, given that only a few campsites take the lake for a reasonable walk before sunrise.

We climbed more than two miles steadily from Solitude Lake – on a section of the road that was built in the 1930s. Civil Protection Troops, a Depression-era government work program – to the Paintbrush Divide, which marks the highest point of the Teton Crest Trail at 10,700 feet.

We stopped and pulled out our bags to take in the breathtaking 360-degree views, enjoying the fact that the rest of the hike would be almost entirely downhill all the way to our final point at String Lake.

Fritiof Fryxell, who served as Grand Teton National Park’s first naturalist, summed up its appeal by considering the completion of the Skyline Trail, the forerunner of the Teton Crest Trail, in 1933. “Crossing this cycle” He wrote“It completely surrounds the three Tetons and the adjacent high peaks and sees them from all sides. In this way, he learns to recognize these peaks with an intimacy that is impossible for a visitor content with distant vistas.”

And that was true: As we completed the trail and looked west, seeing the Tetons from their far and best-known angle, the hills felt infinitely more familiar, infinitely more familiar. real — as if they had finally come out of the two-dimensional image that had dried up in my head for years.