September 11, 2012

WE WANTED TO GET A CLOSER VIEW of the Tetons today, so we drove up to Colter’s Bay at the north end of Jackson Hole. I was secretly happy that John Colter had received some slight recognition. After all, he was the first white man to visit Jackson Hole. A couple of pull outs on the way there offered some majestic views of the Tetons. We had lunch at the Jackson Lake Lodge, which offered equally great views during our meal.

The visitors’ center at the bay had a ranger station nearby, and Carole got the Jr. Ranger booklet and began working on the required activities. While Carole was working on her badge requirements, I took a postprandial walk and saw another man walking near the bay. I hate to admit it, but I did something I have never done before. I walked up to this stranger and asked him his name. He said simply: “Call me Shane.” He is probably still running away from that obnoxious kid who kept yelling “Shane come back.”

We watched a couple of good films on wildlife in the visitors’ center; I became so relaxed that I nearly nodded off. 

Between Carole’s work toward her badge, and our ambling around the area near the bay, we were able to kill time until 6:00pm when a ranger was scheduled to point out wildlife from a particularly scenic vantage point.

The ranger certainly did his job, all without a single hop. From 6:00pm to 7:30pm, we saw elk, bald eagles, white pelicans, cormorants, deer, ospreys and sand hill cranes. The big prize, however, was our first sighting of a grizzly bear in the wild. Lumbering along a river bank, over a half mile away, he posed no danger to us, except possible eye strain. 
 

There was only one point in his presentation where the ranger faltered. When a man wearing a John Deere cap and an Iowa sweatshirt asked what the word Teton meant, the cognoscenti in the crowd chuckled.  Mindful of a handful of young kids in the audience, the ranger launched into a convoluted explanation which he hoped would answer the question for the adults while leaving the kids confused. He lost me when he started talking about the Seinfield episode which featured Teri Hatcher. 

Because the questioner was obviously a farmer, the ranger should have simply said that the mountain men who named the range were very poor spellers and left out the letter “a.” To make sure the questioner understood what he meant, the ranger could have then spelled out the word: t-e-a-t-o-n. If he had taken this approach, the farmer would have said something like the following: “Hah, haw, haw, now I get it; that’s the way they spell it in Udder News, a magazine we get back in Iowa.”

Because of the distances involved, I couldn’t take any pictures of the abundance of wildlife we saw that evening. Also, my attempts at getting a good shot of the sunset over the Tetons failed; I was fumbling around with the “scenery” settings on my camera when the sun was dipping behind the mountains.