Part 1 Welcome to the Tetons
The Grand Teton, the heart of the range, rises to 13,770 feet in elevation.
The Teton Range’s sharp rise off the valley floor provides spectacular scenery and easy access. A day hike puts you right in the mountains.
What Gratitude We Owe
By Margaret E. Murie
A bronze plaque at the doorway of the Maude Noble Cabin on the banks of the Snake River at Moose, Wyoming, recounts a notable meeting in 1923. It was a meeting at which “... Mr. Struthers Burt, Dr. Horace Carncross, Mr. John L. Eynon, Mr. J. R. Jones and Mr. Richard Winger, all residents of Jackson Hole, presented to Mr. Horace Albright, then Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, a plan for setting aside a portion of Jackson Hole as a National Recreation Area for the use and enjoyment of the people of the United States.”
The plaque commemorates both the beginning and the end of a stormy period—from 1918 on into the 1950s—in Jackson Hole’s history. Those meeting at Miss Noble’s simple log cabin wanted to devise a way to save the valley’s natural beauty from commercial exploitation. They wanted it protected by a public agency. These few people recognized the need for safeguarding a meaningful segment of our country from the uses of commerce. Their idea did not catch on immediately.
In 1926 Horace Albright escorted John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and family into Jackson Hole, and a bright hope for this valley was born. Albright imparted to Rockefeller his vision of the whole valley as a national park. Rockefeller said nothing then but later admitted that Albright’s vision had set his own dreams in motion. A land company was formed to shield Rockefeller’s involvement, and it began to purchase valley parcels. Unaware of this, Congress voted to create a Grand Teton National Park in 1929. The park was only about one-third the size of today’s park, protecting only the immediate mountain range, and very little of the valley floor.
Broad, cupped antlers—in velvet here—and an oversized muzzle positively identify the moose.
The world of winter comes to the range and valley with indescribable grace and stillness.
The 150 square miles of mostly mountain land then comprising Grand Teton National Park were not enough to safeguard the complete ecosystem of the valley. Through his agents, Rockefeller quietly purchased ranches and other private lands in upper Jackson Hole, where the soil was not good for ranching and some ranchers were having a hard time. In the avowed purpose of later turning them over to the Federal Government, Rockefeller was carrying out the aims of those who had met at Maude Noble’s cabin. And through all the following stormy years; through the establishment by proclamation of Franklin D. Roosevelt of the Jackson Hole National Monument to contain the Rockefeller-purchased lands; through all the opposition to it; through the eventual negotiated “peace” and the addition of all the monument lands to Grand Teton National Park by Congress in 1950, the Rockefeller family held to its goal of “a complete project.”
So now, after all the years and all the tumult, the cattlemen have their grazing rights on the national forest lands and the right to drift their cattle across national park lands to reach those permits: people still have their homes, dudes still come to the dude ranches. No one, Oldtimer or Newcomer, would now deny that the national park has vitalized the economy of the valley a thousandfold. These material results are quite obvious. Our problem now is not the amount of lands that are under State, private, or Federal jurisdiction, but whether or not we can keep our souls receptive to the message of peace these unspoiled lands offer us.
In my many years living in this valley called Jackson Hole, I have sometimes had half-waking fantasies about how such a very special place came to be. One could almost imagine that 50 or 60 million years ago some great force purposely set about to create a valley as beautiful as any valley could be. A step further into fantasy, one might imagine this great force saying: “Let us start, of course, with mountains. I shall raise up a block of granite from the Earth planet’s interior; over the centuries it will become a magnificent 14,000 feet high; time and the winds and waters will sculpt it. Looking across to it will be other hills and mountains, and glaciers will form the valley and then melt away and there will be waters and streams flowing through. But with only the winds and waters singing, it will be too quiet, it will not be alive, so there must be animals—mammals, birds, fish, frogs, toads, butterflies, and all the rest.”
For many birding enthusiasts the park’s scenery proves merely a dividend. They come to see the stately trumpeter swan, the largest waterfowl species in North America, which nests in the park. Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks provide essential habitat for this bird’s survival.
Fritiof Fryxell, the first ranger naturalist of the park, has described the forming of these peaks: “With continued uplift came a stage when the passing air currents, in surmounting the block, were compelled to rise so high that their moisture condensed. Precipitation over the elevated region was thereby increased. The streams, ever gaining in volume and velocity, now flowed along with the fine enthusiasm and vigor of youth, and like a group of skilled artisans singing at their work, went about their business of sculpturing the range.”
Within this space the Creator must have intended to bring man in humility to his knees. Imagine traveling into the range from either south or north, toward its center. The peaks loom ever higher and steeper and more dramatic until, as Fryxell points out, with the 6.5 kilometers (4 miles) between Avalanche and Cascade, two of the canyons piercing the range, there stand in close ranks the South, Middle, and Grand Teton, Mt. Owen, Teewinot, Nez Perce, Cloudveil Dome, and many spires. These form an overwhelming Gothic assemblage of peaks, a concentrated and unforgettable mountain experience for anyone. And it all goes on, and on, and on, north or south, from there.
This is the Teton Range, but it is not the whole picture. The glaciers that during the Ice Age came through the whole valley left lakes as a row of jewels at the feet of the peaks: Phelps, Taggart, Bradley, Jenny, Leigh, and then finally Jackson lakes, through which the Snake River travels for some 17 miles southward. From the lakes the flat glacial floor extends to meet the river in mid-valley and beyond to all the other beautiful, though not quite so spectacular, mountains and hills that form the north, east, and south walls of the valley known as Jackson Hole.
Those “other mountains” are the Yellowstone Plateau to the north, the Absaroka, the Washakie, and Gros Ventre, merging southward into the Hoback and Snake River Ranges. It is immediately clear why the first mountain men called this type of valley a hole. As the Snake winds its way south from its source in a high mountain meadow in southern Yellowstone National Park, into and out of Jackson Lake, it is joined by other streams: Pacific Creek, the Buffalo River, the Gros Ventre. All are bordered by cottonwood and aspen and spruce and fir forests. The scene is one of infinite variety, and in summer it is aglow with wildflowers of every hue. When I first entered the valley in mid-July of 1927, I thought surely I was entering a fairyland.
We know that for many hundreds of years the Indians came to this valley to hunt and fish, but not to stay. They left the land nearly untouched. Then in the early 1800s came the mountain men to harvest the beaver. And the valley became the favorite of one David Jackson, for whom it was named by his fur trade partner, William Sublette, in 1829, 100 years before Grand Teton National Park was established.
The first white settlers came to the hole about 1884, settling first in the southern part of the valley. Grass grew there and hay could be raised. Cattle could live there. But it was a demanding environment. The settlers worked hard all summer and battled cold and deep snow in winter, feeding their stock by horse-drawn sleigh or on snowshoes. Much could be written about their survival techniques, but what interests us here in connection with the national park is that the life they led nurtured a bold and independent spirit. They believed in their “first rights” to this part of the world, and resisted anything threatening their independence and proprietary feelings. Most of what is now the national park was part of Teton National Forest in 1929, and cattlemen had grazing rights on the forest. Naturally they were flamingly opposed to anything that might change their privileges. This was the human background for the long drama of saving a good portion of Jackson Hole in its natural state, for the benefit of untold generations of people from all over the world.
Author Mardy Murie and her late husband, Olaus, came to Jackson Hole for his now world famous elk studies. Her home base is still in Jackson Hole, although she travels across North America in the cause of conservation.
Teton country was a part of the West where, thankfully, gold was not an issue. An oldtimer once left this notice on a Snake River gravel bar:
Payin gold will never be found here
No matter how many men tries
There’s some enough to begile one
Like tanglefoot paper does flies.
That left cattle as the only “gold,” with their owners ready to fight for what they considered their rights. The puzzling yet invigorating diversity among people is part of the long evolution of the human spirit. Jackson Hole was and still is a fascinating microcosm reflecting these diversities, and they all played roles in the long controversy that colors the history of this great national park.
Aspens gone golden for autumn stand reflected in the Snake River.
The few remaining Jackson Hole ranches reflect the Old West.
One of the valley’s most famous residents, author Struthers Burt, once wrote: “I am afraid for my own country unless some help is given it—some wise direction. It is too beautiful and now too famous. Sometimes I dream of it unhappily.” When Burt wrote this there had irrupted at Jenny Lake and nearby, in front of the most impressive view of the main Teton peaks, a gasoline station, tourist cabins, a hot dog stand, a dance hall, and some rusting bodies of automobiles. No wonder he dreamed unhappily. But “some wise direction” did come. All the old blight along the highway has been removed and today there is a small ranger station, a tents-only campground, camper store, a small visitor center, and a small boat dock.
“The American public will not leave Jackson Hole alone; nor can we ask them to,” my husband, Olaus, wrote in 1943. “They will be coming in increasing numbers. In any situation involving large numbers of us, some regulation becomes a necessity, whether we like it or not.... It should be our ambition to assist all agencies to keep intact this one segment of America that we boast of as ‘the last of the Old West.’”
The Indians hunted and fished in this valley for all those hundreds of years and left no mark. The white man has been here less than one hundred and has left many marks. Today we have enlarged Grand Teton National Park, and the staff of the park now copes with a flow of nearly three million visitors each year.
On the edges and outskirts of the park, we still have the cloud of what Robert Righter describes in his history of the park as “the threats of subdivision and mammonism.” Righter bemoans the damper such activities can put on the human spirit otherwise inspired by the mountain range. “It seems important,” he says, “that future generations know that the Park commemorates not only the grandeur of nature but also the spirit of men acting for a noble cause; it is a park not of chance but of man’s design.”
Today, come to this national park with an open mind, open eyes, and an open heart. Leave your conveyance; walk the trails up into the canyons, around the lakes, into the hills, canoe on some of the lakes. Stand quietly at dusk by a beaver pond and you may see a moose or two or three, some ducks, a great blue heron, a pair of trumpeter swans. The list is long of what may be seen. And the list is equally long—or longer—of what may be heard if you stand quietly: the song of the Swainson’s thrush or the ruby-crowned kinglet, the raucous conversation of ravens, the chatter of pine squirrels, the rattling call of sandhill cranes.
Go by foot or canoe or kayak or on a quiet horse or, in winter, on cross-country skis. You will sense the full and busy and yet harmonious life pattern of the wild ones. It will come to mean something very special to you, for it is a balm and a benediction. It is a reminder of your primeval roots. Stand at the edge of some woods at night and hear a great-horned owl hooting; perhaps, if you are lucky, coyotes singing; or, after September 1, some bull elk bugling.
Be glad they are all still here. These quiet adventures will remain with you always. And think then, too, what might have happened in this valley, and what gratitude we owe a few.