Grand Teton National Park

Listen first. Out here, the wind moves through sagebrush with a dry, papery hiss. Crush a leaf between your fingers and you get that sharp, clean smell, like rain on hot ground. The valley floor is wide, flat and pale, and then, almost without warning, a wall of grey granite rises straight out of it. There are no gentle foothills to soften the view. That sudden, sheer face is the first thing to understand about this place.

You are standing in Grand Teton National Park, in the northwest corner of Wyoming. The flat basin around you is called Jackson Hole. In the language of early nineteenth-century fur trappers, a 'hole' was a high mountain valley ringed by peaks. This one took the name of David Jackson, a trapper who worked these rivers in the 1820s. The town of Jackson, to the south, came later and borrowed the name.

The mountains themselves got their name from French-speaking trappers. Looking up at the tallest summits, they called them 'les trois tétons', the three breasts. It is a blunt, earthy name, and it stuck. The highest of the three is the Grand Teton, at nearly 4,200 metres. From the valley floor, the peak stands more than two kilometres above you. That is why the range looks so close and so tall at the same time.

Here is the first surprise. These are among the youngest mountains in the Rocky Mountain chain. Geologists believe the range began to rise only around ten million years ago. Yet the rock in its core is some of the oldest in North America, at roughly two and a half billion years old or more. Young mountains, ancient stone. Both things are true at once.

The reason is a single long crack in the earth, the Teton Fault. It runs along the base of the range, right where the mountains meet the sage. Over millions of years, the block of land to the west tilted upward, and the valley floor dropped down. Earthquake after earthquake, the gap grew. That is why there are no foothills here. You are looking at the broken edge of a block, and the fault is still considered active today.

Ice finished the work. During the ice ages, glaciers flowed down the canyons and carved them into deep, U-shaped valleys. When the ice reached the flat ground, it melted and left behind ridges of rubble called moraines. Those ridges held back water. That is how lakes like Jenny Lake, Leigh Lake and others came to sit in a neat chain along the foot of the range. Small glaciers still cling to the high peaks today.

Now look carefully at the Middle Teton, just south of the tallest summit. On many days you can see a dark vertical stripe running down its face. This is a dike, a band of darker volcanic rock that pushed up through a crack in the lighter granite long ago and cooled there. Once you notice it, you will see it from almost every viewpoint in the southern part of the park.

People knew this valley long before the trappers arrived. Shoshone, Bannock, Crow and other Native peoples travelled through Jackson Hole for thousands of years. They came in the warm months to hunt, gather plants and quarry stone. The winters were too harsh for year-round life. Archaeologists have found campsites and tools around the lakes, quiet evidence of a very long human story here.

The second surprise is how hard it was to protect this view. A small national park was created in 1929, but it covered mainly the mountains. The valley floor was ranch land and private property. In the 1920s and 1930s, John D. Rockefeller Junior quietly bought up thousands of hectares through a company that hid his name. He planned to give the land to the nation. Many local ranchers were angry when they found out.

The fight lasted years. In 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt declared much of the valley a national monument, and the anger grew louder. Finally, in 1950, the monument and Rockefeller's land were joined to the original park. The result is what you see now. The mountains and the valley are protected together, as one landscape, instead of a row of peaks above a field of fences.

You can still find traces of the ranching years. East of the river, along a gravel road called Mormon Row, old wooden barns stand against the backdrop of the range. Settlers from Utah built homesteads here around the start of the twentieth century. Their weathered gables are now some of the most photographed buildings in the American West. Farther north, the Snake River bends below a high overlook, where Ansel Adams made a famous black-and-white photograph in 1942.

The valley also belongs to the animals. Bison graze the open flats. Moose browse in the willows along creeks and rivers. Elk move between the forest edge and the meadows, and pronghorn race across the sage. Grizzly and black bears both live in the park. Give every animal plenty of space, and carry bear spray if you walk the trails. Dawn and dusk are the best hours to see wildlife moving.

The light changes everything here. In the early morning, the sun comes from behind you, over the eastern hills, and strikes the peaks directly. The granite turns pink, then gold, then grey. On calm mornings, the lakes and the slow bends of the river hold a near-perfect reflection. By afternoon, the light comes from behind the range, and the mountains turn into dark, flat shapes against the sky.

So take a moment before you move on. Find the dark stripe on the Middle Teton. Trace the line where the sage meets the rock, because that line is the fault. Notice how quiet it is between gusts of wind. As you walk away, look back once more. The range will look exactly as it did, and also, slightly, it will be rising.