by Dina Mishev
With all of the valley’s megafauna, it is the pica, a small mammal with big ears and short limbs, that is Linda’s favorite animal. “They’re such curious critters,” she says. “The more you learn about their life cycles, the more fascinating they are. They live in the mountains and live on grass; it’s a particularly unique habitat and I think this area is a bit of a stronghold for them.” Linda’s license plate even reads“PICA.”
Historically, the southern end of Jackson Hole was prime winter range for elk. But with the growth of the town of Jackson, 75 percent of this migration corridor was difficult for elk to get to. They had to navigate homesteads and fences. With only 25 percent of their former winter range available, Jackson Hole elk began to die in mass numbers. Locals saw this and were alarmed. It was too late to move the town at that point, but not too late to begin preserving the land north and east of town. In the summer, there’s not much to see on the National Elk Refuge. Elk usually begin migrating from higher ground to the refuge in October and remain until April. In winter, it is possible to take a sleigh ride into the middle of the elk herd. www.fws.gov/refuge/national_elk_refuge/
Sleigh Rides
Sleighs pulled by 2,000-pound Belgian and Percheron draft horses can get much closer to the thousands of elk wintering on the National Elk Refuge than is possible for anyone to do by foot. Wrapped in a blanket on a sleigh, you’re literally surrounded by elk. The secret? These elk are accustomed to the sleighs, which have been visiting the herd for more than 100 years. Before there were official sleigh ride tours, there were the feed sleighs, which started running the first winter of the refuge. Generations of elk have grown up around sleighs and know they’re not a threat.
JENNY LAKE LODGE
Jenny Lake Lodge is often booked out a year in advance, but don’t expect over-the-top amenities. This collection of historic log cabins—many date from the 1920s—near the northern end of Jenny Lake doesn’t have televisions, and there’s only a phone in your room if you request it. Quilts are handmade though, and the lodge’s breakfast and five-course dinner (both available to non-guests, with a prior reservation) are among the best meals in the valley.
LOCAL LOWDOWN MATT HAZARD, Grand Teton National Park Landscape Architect
When he’s not working, the landscape architect heading up the 5-year project to revamp Jenny Lake, including re-doing upwards of 5 miles of trails and all signage, prefers hiking without trails. “I like not knowing where I am,” says GTNP landscape architect Matt Hazard, picured on the right in the photo. “I think that slight kind of fear you get from not knowing exactly where you are makes for an adventuresome trip. But that kind of feeling is only good when it’s what you want.” Hazard says that one of the main reasons the park spent so much time and money on Jenny Lake is that many visitors to the area, the most visited in the park, were feeling lost when they didn’t want to be.
A Mississippi native, Matt first hiked around Jenny Lake when he was a kid vacationing in GTNP with his family. “Growing up, I had this appreciation for being out west,” he says. Hazard family vacations were often to the West’s national parks. Matt remembers hiking down to Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the Grand Canyon when he was eleven. The first time he hiked around Jenny Lake with the eyes of a landscape architect he thought, “Wow, this area needs a lot of work.” Matt got confused as to where to start hiking and at several points as he hiked around the lake. “It was a disaster,” he says. “One spot in particular was really bad. Park staff called it ‘confusion junction.’”
While nearly 2 million people come to Jenny Lake on their vacation, Matt tries to get away from it when he’s off work. He likes hiking in Moose Basin, across Jackson Lake, and in Upper and Lower Berry Canyons. “Some of the geological formations up there are unreal,” he says. “And there are no people.”
In the refuge’s early years, people wanting a closer look at the elk could go out on the feed sleighs. By the 1960s though, there were so many people who wanted to ride along there wasn’t room, so separate touring sleighs began running. Nowadays they run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day except Christmas from mid-December through early April, whether it’s 30 degrees below zero or 30 degrees above zero. (Every sleigh, which is hand-built, comes with a pile of wool blankets.)
Don’t concentrate too much on the elk or you’ll miss the other animals that live on the refuge. The refuge is home to more than 150 species of amphibians and birds including bald eagles, sage grouse, and trumpeter swans and forty-five different species of mammals, including moose, bison, bighorn sheep, and pronghorn. www.fws.gov/refuge/national_elk_refuge/
Cache Creek
The Cache Creek area, less than 2 miles east of Jackson’s Town Square, is the most used area of the Bridger-Teton National Forest (BTNF). Some locals hike or bike here every day. When the BTNF conducts visitor use monitoring surveys, one of the questions asked is, “How many times have you visited the national forest in the last year?” Regarding the Cache Creek trailheads, answers are often, “I might have missed 5 days last year.” “When you look at [the BTNF] compared to other forests in the nation, we have one of the highest frequencies of use of any of them,” says program manager Linda Merigliano. And Cache Creek is a favorite local spot for a daily connection to nature. Still, there are enough trails—Putt Putt, Hagen, Sidewalk Trail, Serengeti—so that it doesn’t feel crowded. The main trail, an abandoned Forest Service road, is the busiest in the drainage, but make it past the first 1.5 miles (the road goes for about 5 miles) and the crowds dwindle to nothing.
Cache Creek isn’t just about convenience. It is gorgeous, with trails winding along Cache Creek, moose sightings, and some of the valley’s best late-spring wildflowers.
DRY STONE CONSERVANCY
Most of the trails around Jenny Lake, the single busiest spot in Grand Teton National Park and at the mouth of Cascade Canyon, were built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) back in the 1930s. The CCC crews used mostly dry stone masonry to build trails. An ancient method of building (Egypt’s pyramids and Central America’s Maya temples used it), dry stone structures can actually become sturdier with wear and time. Still, when the CCC built the Jenny Lake infrastructure in the 1930s, there were only thousands of people who visited the lake. At the turn of the millennium, Jenny Lake was getting millions of visitors every year. The original dry stone masonry needed repair. Unfortunately, it was a dying art.
Dry Stone Conservancy, a Kentucky-based group that trains stonemasons to relearn the craft, came to the rescue. The work Jenny Lake needed was so substantial that the group didn’t just train GTNP’s trail crew, but sent out a crew of its own to help, and to provide more extensive training than available in a weekend workshop (if you’re interested, these are offered in Lexington, Kentucky). Dry Stone Conservancy masons had been trained by a Scottish master stonemason. After years of working alongside the Dry Stone Conservancy pros, GTNP now has its own in-house crew of dry stonemasons.
Walking around Jenny Lake, it’s difficult to tear your eyes from the mountains, but, if you do, notice the craftsmanship of the new stone steps on the trail and the new retaining walls . . . not that you’ll be able to tell they’re new. “One of the cool things about dry stone work is that you can’t tell when it was built. It could have been 1900,” says Matt Hazard. gtnpf.org/initiatives/the-campaign-for-jenny-lake
LOCAL LOWDOWN Grand Teton National Park’s Wildlife Brigade
“Bear management is people management,” says GTNP bear management specialist Kate Wilmot. With grizzly bears recovering well under the Endangered Species Act, their habitat has expanded south. There’s now no doubt these animals are in Grand Teton National Park. (Black bears have always lived in GTNP.) Into the 1990s, there were perhaps a couple of grizzlies living in the park, but only in the most northern areas, in canyons where there are no official hiking trails. At the time, they were so few and so rarely seen, most locals believed they just weren’t there. That thinking ended in the early 2000s. The summer of 20
04, a grizzly sow and her cub spent much of their time near roads in the northern part of the park. A couple of years later, a sow had a litter of three cubs, and this family also spent much of their time near roads, near Jackson Lake Junction. Word quickly got out that Grand Teton National Park was a great place to see grizzlies.
Since park rangers were already overextended, GTNP came up with a pilot program to manage human and bear interactions, also known as “bear jams.” Rather than manage the bears or manage the scene, GTNP’s new Wildlife Brigade had the goal of managing the people. “We decided to model ourselves on Yellowstone in this aspect,” says Wilmot. “We knew other places that essentially had tried to haze bears away from developed areas and saw that that wasn’t working. The way Yellowstone was doing it was successful, so that’s what we copied.”
GTNP’s Wildlife Brigade, which consists mostly of seasonal volunteers (they get an RV spot in exchange for being on the brigade), has been so successful, “we’re almost too successful,” Wilmot says. “We get called to hornet jams now.” She’s not kidding. “Park visitors go crazy for almost anything,” she says. “And that’s great—to see people so excited about seeing wildlife but sometimes that excitement can lead to people making bad decisions, or just doing things that they don’t know they shouldn’t do.”
Wilmot says bear jams are “absolutely insane.” Moose are the second most popular. If there is a young moose, you can forget common sense. Big bull moose are also quite attractive for visitors. Everything else—great grey owls, elk—are still exciting, but don’t have the level of insanity. One recent summer, two grizzly sows, both with multiple cubs, hung out in Willow Flats, near Jackson Lake Junction. Often there would be cars parked on the side of the road for more than a mile.
Park rules prohibit “willfully approaching, remaining, viewing, or engaging in any activity within 100 yards of bears or wolves, or within 25 yards of any other wildlife including nesting birds; or within any distance that disturbs, displaces, or otherwise interferes with the free unimpeded movement of wildlife, or creates or contributes to a potentially hazardous condition or situation.”
Wildlife Brigade teams—there’s a southern one and a northern one—are out daily during the summer season. When there’s no wildlife jam to be managed, they patrol campgrounds and parking lots. “Food storage is one of the best things we can do to help bears and people co-exist,” Wilmot says. “Of course, we want visitors to see wildlife, but it’s our job to protect the wildlife too. And we don’t want these bears to think we’re nice or have food for them.”
Laurence Rockefeller Preserve in Grand Teton National Park
At the 1,106-acre Laurence Rockefeller Preserve, a private retreat of the Rockefeller family until it was assumed into GTNP in 2007, parking is limited to fifty cars. Enforcement is by friendly-but-firm preserve staff. People come here for some of the flattest hiking trails in the park, including a 7-mile loop around Phelps Lake, one of the glacial lakes at the base of the Tetons, and also to hang out in high-backed Adirondack chairs in the shade on the interpretive center’s front porch. Inside the interpretive center, you’ll find a small library, big leather chairs, and a Terry Tempest Williams poem written on a wall. nps.gov/grte
PART 3EAST ENTRANCE
Leaving Yellowstone via the East Entrance takes you immediately into Buffalo Bill territory. Two miles outside the park, you’ll discover Pahaska Tepee Resort, which Buffalo Bill founded as a hunting lodge. It opened to guests in 1905 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. The resort still hosts overnight guests, whether they’re hunters or hikers.
The Buffalo Bill connection grows deeper as you head farther away from the park. Travel roughly 50 miles alongside the South Fork of the Shoshone River, and you will arrive in Cody, Wyoming, the town founded by the famous showman. Cody, population 9,800, has matured since the days Buffalo Bill held tryouts for his Wild West show in empty lots around the Irma Hotel, which he named for his daughter. The Buffalo Bill Center of the West is often called the “Smithsonian of the West” and art galleries dot Sheridan Avenue. Still, there’s a nightly rodeo, a staged gunfight in downtown, and a family-owned shoe store where staff take pride in custom-making the cowboy boots of your dreams.
But don’t limit yourself to Cody. A visit to the towns of Meeteetse and Thermopolis is a step back in time. In Meeteetse, you can find some of the best homemade chocolate truffles you’ve ever tasted. Visit Thermopolis and take a soak in mineral hot springs at Wyoming’s most popular state park. Then watch paleontologists at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center work on dinosaur fossils excavated nearby.
Yellowstone’s East Entrance combines true Wild West history with authentic, small-town charm. There are also wild horses, Wyoming’s own “Grand Canyon” (the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area), and the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center. Opened in 2011, the center exists to explain what life was like at the Heart Mountain Internment Camp, home to more than 10,000 Japanese Americans from August 1942 to November 1945.
ROAD TRIP 1 ALL ROADS LEAD TO CODY
Like the South Entrance, Yellowstone’s East Entrance is far removed from civilization. Wapiti is about 20 miles from the East Entrance but has minimal services; Cody is 52 miles away. You might be tempted to rush headlong toward Cody’s shops, museums, galleries, and restaurants, but sit back and enjoy the scenery on a meandering drive down the stretch of highway between the East Entrance and Cody. President Teddy Roosevelt once called this “the 50 most beautiful miles in America.” He wasn’t lying.
Scenic Byways
Twenty-eight miles of US 14/16/20 between the East Entrance and Cody were designated as the Buffalo Bill Cody Scenic Byway in 1991. Wyoming was a little slower to recognize the road’s uniqueness: It was designated a Wyoming Scenic Byway in 1995.
FOREST SERVICE CABIN
The Wapiti Ranger Station, 19 miles east of Pahaska Tepee on US 14, wasn’t the first ranger station to be built in the country, but it is now the oldest ranger station still standing. It was the first ranger station to be built using federal money. (When early forest rangers Nathaniel Wilkerson and Henry C. Tuttle built the Alta Ranger Station in the Bitterroot National Forest in 1899, which was the first ranger station in the country, they paid for it out of their own pockets and were never reimbursed.) The Wapiti Ranger Station, which was actually two buildings—a log cabin living quarters and a detached office—was built in 1904 from timber collected nearby. In the 100+ years since it was constructed, the structures have been modified—they were joined into a single building—and old logs have been replaced, but it’s still in use. (307) 527-6241
Leaving Yellowstone, the byway follows the burbling Shoshone River; at many points, the river and road are no more than a cast apart. If you have a Wyoming fishing license, you can cast in the Shoshone. It’s considered some of the best fly fishing in the state with brown, rainbow, cutbow, and Yellowstone cutthroat trout.
Elsewhere it might be difficult to tear your gaze from a river as aggressively beautiful as the Shoshone, but here you have locals—bison, grizzly bears, bighorn sheep, elk—vying for your attention. Once you leave the East Entrance, you’re still in protected land, the 2.5-million-acre Shoshone National Forest. It is believed that the eastern side of Yellowstone and into this valley has the highest concentration of grizzly bears in the Lower 48.
The rock formations are pretty out of this world too. Features range from the Holy City to the Chimney and the Castle, and there are dozens of others that you can have fun naming yourself. There’s one that looks just like Snoopy and another that resembles a wedding cake. Much of the valley is part of the Absaroka Volcanic Field, a 3,000-square-mile area where a series of volcanic rocks are up to 9,000 feet thick.
The scenic byway officially ends at the border of the Shoshone National Forest, but the scenery doesn’t end. You’ll pass through the Buffalo Bill State Park, the Buffalo Bill Reservoir, Buffalo Bill Dam, and Cedar and Rattlesnake Mountains on your way to Co
dy. scenicbyways.info
The Shoshone National Forest was established in 1891 as part of the Yellowstone Timberland Reserve, making it the country’s first national forest. At 2.5 million acres, the Shoshone National Forest is 200,000 acres larger than Yellowstone National Park. The forest has more than 1,300 miles of hiking trails in it and over half of the forest is officially designated as wilderness. In wilderness areas, motorized or mechanized travel or equipment is not allowed. The Shoshone’s five wilderness areas are: Washakie, Fitzpatrick, Absaroka-Beartooth, North Absaroka, and Popo Agie Wildernesses. The highest mountain in Wyoming, 13,804-foot Gannett Peak, is in the Shoshone National Forest. (307) 527-6241, www.fs.usda.gov
LOCAL LOWDOWN BOB RICHARD, Retired Yellowstone Park Ranger
Bob Richard’s family has guided people into Yellowstone since 1906. In the 1950s, when he was home from college, Bob was Yellowstone’s first front-country ranger on horseback.
“I’d ride a horse into a campground and visit with people. [I’d] help them correct things they didn’t know they were doing wrong, like dumping waste water out of their trailer,” he says. After graduating from college, Bob passed up a full-time job in Yellowstone to become a pilot in the Marine Corps. He went on to fight in the Vietnam War. After the war, he worked as a teacher and school administrator, for the Red Cross in California, and then returned to Cody to found Grub Steak Expeditions, which led visitors into Yellowstone. Bob sold Grub Steak when he was in his 70s. He now fills his time with photography and writing books about the Yellowstone area. His most recent book is Cody to Yellowstone Beartooth Loop. Bob has also written a book that is a self-guided photographic tour of the area. codytoyellowstone.com
