Every other year, we go and visit my partner's family in Colorado (Denver and Evergreen), and usually we fly down. Well, this year, we decided to drive down from Alberta, and make a road trip out of it, camping on the way down and camping on the way back up. We decided to see the Tetons on the way down, and Glacier on the way back. This is about the Tetons portion of the trip.
To see the Tetons, we spent two nights on the Idaho side, and two nights camping in the actual national park. And to summarize, we LOVED the Tetons from the Idaho side. Grand Teton National Park was SO crowded, and so crazy, and we found the whole process of first-come first-serve campgrounds super stressful. If I go back to the Tetons, I think we will rather stay in the national forests - Targhee or Bridger Teton, and base our explorations from there.
But, while we were on the Idaho side, we decided to spend a day hiking around at Grand Targhee - and it was amazing! One of the highlights of our whole trip. If any of you are in the 'Wydaho' area during the summer, I would highly recommend it. We were skeptical at first of the idea of lift-accessed hiking, but honestly, it was amazing. We had the best views of the Tetons of our whole trip, we got to summit THREE! (yes, three!) mountains - and this is very exciting with an 11 and 13 year old - and spend all day in alpine wildflower-filled meadows. This was well worth it.
We didn't know what to expect because the summer trail maps of Grand Targhee are terrible - 2 of the 3 mountains we summited aren't even listed as having trails, but we kind of figured it out along the way, and met a very nice hiker on the way who told us about the trails in more detail.
We don't know the elevation gain or distance, but, I would say that the total distance was somewhere between 5 and 7 miles, and the elevation gain was a couple of thousand feet - some of it felt quite steep. Overall, I would say that this is a moderate hike- and worth every bit of effort!
Here are some photos!
The hiking at Grand Targhee is mostly above treeline and dips into the trees on occasion - every bit of it is beautiful!!!!
Brian and the kids on the trail - this gives you a bit of an idea of some of the steep parts of this trail - there are some parts even steeper than this.
Most of the the hiking has views into Grand Teton National Park and Jedediah Smith Wilderness - like the one above!
This is a view from the saddle between 2 mountains - Peaked Mountain and Mary's Nipple - this was a gorgeous viewpoint!
This is a view over to Peaked mountain.
To be continued below....