Friday 9 September
I must admit, I’d never heard of Grand Teton until my wife included it in our itinerary. Consequently, I wouldn’t have known that its name is French for ‘big breasts’. You live and learn.
Grand Teton is a National Park in northwestern Wyoming. It’s about 310,000 acres, making it a little bigger than Bedfordshire. That helps you a lot, doesn’t it? Our leisurely drive through the park involves stops at various photogenic places: Jackson Point, Flagg Ranch, Oxbow Bend and the aptly named Signal Point…
…although it turns out the name isn’t anything to do with the strength of the 5G. It was where people searching for a lost hunter lit a fire to signal to others they’d found his drowned body. This was in 1891 when they didn’t even have 1G. Signal Point sits atop a 2,355m mountain. Luckily for us, you can drive virtually to the summit.
We check into our room at Colter Bay Village. It’s another wooden cabin but luxurious compared to the glorified outhouse at Old Faithful. It has power points, adequate pillows, lots more space and, nice touch this, helpful signs telling us what to do in event of the room being invaded by bats. There’s no mention of the correct procedure in case a bear should wander in.
Meeting a bear on our walks is unlikely but still a possibility, so I carry a can of bear spray in a little shoulder pouch. You’re also supposed to sing or talk loudly while you’re out walking. Our singing voices would indeed scare off all but the most ravenous grizzly, but I decide instead to bang two rocks together. Our progress through beautiful, serene countryside is accompanied by rhythms any bear with a keen musical ear would easily recognise as early Santana.
We pass other hikers from time to time, observing the unwritten rule whereby you exchange greetings when the trail is sparsely populated, but not when the number of other walkers reaches a certain point. I don’t know if there’s a precise walker/density figure beyond which saying good morning starts to sound weird, but we can all sense when it’s been reached. Today, quite a few people say ‘sorry about your queen’ after hearing our accents. Which is nice. In general, the younger hikers don’t say anything at all.
I thought the eagle was about to take off. In fact, she was tensing up for a good poo.
Colter Bay Village is a summer camp offering kayaking, canoeing, motorboats and lake cruises. This is a stock shot of their marina as it should look:
And this is what it looked like when we were there. #ClimateChange
Steps: 16,315
Saturday 10 September
I’ve got some of these photos in the wrong order, I think. Does that matter? Only to my reader. Hello, Carol! Anyway, today we’re off to the elegantly named Jackson Hole and its Cowboy Village Resort. Yee-ha! Our cabin has a pair of double beds arranged bunk bed style, which will prove a little challenging come nighttime.
Before that, we embark upon a two-and-a-half-mile walk to Inspiration Point, which overlooks Jenny Lake. It’s on this walk that we come across the bald-headed eagle. Actually, someone on the trail points it out to us, making the be-quiet sign as we approach. We take about 300 pictures and wait in vain for it to swoop off to fetch a carp or something. It just perches there, so after a while we reluctantly proceed with our walk.
Returning to the same spot an hour or so later, a couple of guys with excited expressions put their fingers to their lips as we approach. I smile and nod in an attempt to convey that, yes, we already know about the eagle. It doesn’t work. Their admonitions get more frantic, involving jabbing their fingers towards the tree, making ‘calm down’ and ‘zip your lip’ gestures.
As we get close one of the guys whispers conspiratorially ‘there’s an eagle up in that tree!’ I glance up. ‘Still there? All the other ones have gone, I see.”
Steps: 26,051
Sunday 11 September
We’re still in Jackson and still avoiding bears. We walk to lakes Taggart and Bradley in the morning and in the afternoon take a three-hour, 13-mile float raft trip down Snake River, accompanied by a dozen American tourists and one very knowledgeable oarsman called Dave.
He tells us that Jackson is second only to Manhattan in terms of real estate prices, driven ever-upwards by ultra-wealthy second-homers. He identifies the trees and birds we pass and is happy to tell me exactly what a dude ranch is.
About two hours into our peaceful meander through the Wyoming countryside, one of our fellow travellers asks a question. “What river is this?” she asks. That’s a bit strange, like being shown around Windsor Castle and at the end asking the guide “Does this castle have a name?” But then her husband outdoes her. He asks Dave “Does the river go around in a circle?”
The scenery is beautiful and, like so much of what we see on our US holiday, impossible to capture on film.
In the evening we explore the town of Jackson Hole. It soon becomes obvious we’re in the Souvenir Hoodie Capital of America. Virtually every other shop sells Wyoming apparel, bringing enormous economic benefits to *checks labels* Pakistan.
The town is strong on its Wild West heritage and apparently hosts cowboy-style shoot-ups during the holiday season. I suppose it’s the hats that tell you whether you’re witnessing one of those or a real-life modern-day shoot-up. We eat burgers at a down-and-dirty sports bar – anything beyond the $ or $$ bracket is prohibitively expensive for us given the state of the exchange rate.
We fancy rounding the evening off with a quick beer so poke our noses into a couple of bars. The Cowboy Bar is clearly for tourists and the Roadhouse Pub is 100% full of locals. So we reject them both, pretty much on those grounds.
Steps: 21,456. Next: Salt Lake City. Don’t mention the mor…mons.
Where we go and what we do 
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