Grand Teton National Park WYOMING
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR Oscar L. Chapman, Secretary
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE Conrad L. Wirth, Director
WARNING
This park, mostly wilderness, is the home of many wild animals, which roam it unmolested. Though they may seem tame, they are not! Some have been known to attack visitors without apparent provocation and have caused serious injury. Watch them at a safe distance; when driving, do not stop unless you can pull off the road; and stay in your car. For your safety, we must enforce the regulation which prohibits feeding or molesting these wild animals. Campers, and those who frequent roads and trails on foot, should exercise constant care to avoid attacks and injuries.
Historic Events
Grand Teton NATIONAL PARK
Grand Teton National Park includes the most scenic portion of the majestic Teton Mountain Range and the northern portion of Jackson Hole, a high mountain valley famous for its associations with early western history. Through congressional action in 1950 the greater portion of the former Jackson Hole National Monument was added to the park. The portions not so added were included in the National Elk Refuge and the Teton National Forest. The enlarged park contains approximately 300,000 acres of Federal lands.
The park is a part of the National Park System owned by the people of the United States and administered for them by the National Park Service of the Department of the Interior.
The great array of peaks which constitute the scenic climax of Grand Teton National Park is one of the noblest in the world. Southwest of Jenny Lake, which is in the central portion of the park, is a culminating group of lofty peaks whose dominating feature is the Grand Teton. Much of the mountainous area of the park is above timber line; the Grand Teton rises to 13,766 feet and towers more than 7,000 feet above the floor of Jackson Hole.
The Snake River, flowing south from Yellowstone National Park, widens into Jackson Lake, 14 miles long. Below the lake, the swift river bisects and cuts ever deeper into the glacial outwash plain of the Ice Age. North of this upland valley lie the high plateaus of Yellowstone National Park; on the east and south are the Mount Leidy highlands and the Gros Ventre Mountains. Emma Matilda and Two Ocean, two lovely mountain lakes, lie north of the Snake and its tributary, Buffalo Fork.
Together the Teton Mountains and Jackson Hole form a landscape of matchless grandeur and majesty unlike any other in America.
History of the Region
The Tetons are remarkably rich in historic traditions. The Grand Teton itself has been referred to by an eminent historian as “the most noted historic summit of the West.”
Up to 1800, Indians held undisputed sway over the country dominated by the Three Tetons. Jackson Hole was literally a happy hunting ground, and, while the severe winters precluded permanent habitation, during the milder seasons, bands of Indians frequently came across the passes into the basins on warring or hunting expeditions.
The Tetons probably first became known to white men in 1807-8, when the intrepid John Colter, originally a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, explored the region for the fur trader, Manuel Lisa. On his return trip he became the discoverer of the geyser and hot-spring area of what is now Yellowstone National Park.
The Astorians, the first Americans to go overland after Lewis and Clark, passed through Jackson Hole in 1811 and crossed the Tetons on their way to the mouth of the Columbia.
The decades that followed are frequently referred to as the “Fur Trade Era,” for then Jackson Hole was a veritable crossroads of the Rocky Mountain fur trade and the scene of intensive exploration and trapping activities by both British and American fur interests. Explorations by such “mountain men” as Robert Stuart, Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger, and Kit Carson helped to insure the acquisition of “Oregon Territory” for the United States.
The picturesque name of “Jackson Hole” for this high mountain valley dates back to 1829, when Capt. William Sublette named it for his fellow trapper and partner, David E. Jackson, when he found him in camp on the shore of “Jackson’s Lake” after the Wind River rendezvous of 1829.
The Rocky Mountain fur trade declined sharply after 1839, and during the period of the great migrations to Oregon, California, and Utah in the 1840’s and 1850’s via South Pass, the Jackson Hole country was largely deserted. There were brief flurries of interest in 1860, when Jim Bridger guided the Raynolds’ expedition through Jackson Hole, and in 1863, when Montana prospectors searched the gravel bars of Snake River for gold.
In the period from 1872 to 1880 several Government expeditions explored the valley and named most of the geological features of the surrounding country. Thomas Moran, the famous artist, and William H. Jackson, the “Pioneer Photographer,” painted and photographed the Tetons during some of these expeditions.
The first settlers came to Jackson Hole in 1884, and began building homes at what later became the villages of Jackson, Moran, and Wilson. During these days of early settlement Jackson Hole acquired a reputation as the hideout of many of the outlaws of the West. No doubt some did use this secluded valley as a hideaway, but undoubtedly these stories were exaggerated, as Jackson Hole sometimes is confused with the “Hole in the Wall” and other known sanctuaries of Wyoming “bad men.”
Sculpture of the Landscape
Geologists regard the Teton Range as one of the most impressive known ranges of the “fault block” type. Ages ago, along a great break in the earth’s crust (the “Teton Fault”) a gigantic block was uplifted and given a westward slant. Long-continued sculpturing of this tilted fault block by many natural agencies—frost, streams, avalanches of rock and snow, and glaciers—has produced the notable scenic features of the Teton Range as we now see it.
—UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD PHOTO Mount Teewinot as seen from the Jenny Lake Museum.
Streams on the east slope, having steeper gradients and therefore more rapid flow than the other streams, cut spectacular canyons on this side of the range. As these streams have worked back into the giant block, they have caused the divide to migrate westward, diverting more and more drainage to the east and leaving the great peaks standing like monuments on the ever-widening east slope.
East of the Teton Fault, in the Jackson Hole area, another great earth block lies deeply buried beneath debris brought down into the basin by mountain streams and glaciers. Changes wrought by the great glaciers of the Ice Age have given the region much of its distinctive character. Glacial erosion is strikingly evident in the sharply chiselled peaks, the U-shaped canyons and the profound basins (“cirques”) at their heads, and the numerous little alpine tarns (lakelets occupying ice-gouged basins). The irregular wooded ridges of Jackson Hole, on the other hand, are due to glacial deposition, being composed of bouldery debris heaped up by the ice. Some of these moraines form the dams which enclose the beautiful lakes at the foot of the Teton Range—Phelps, Taggart, Bradley, Jenny, Leigh, and Jackson Lakes. The broad terraced plains of Jackson Hole are for the most part great sheets of gravel spread out on the valley floor by the glacial streams of the Ice Age.
Small glaciers still found among the Teton Peaks are now believed to be youthful ice bodies only a few thousand years old, rather than the dwindling remnants of great glaciers of the Ice Age, as was formerly thought.
A fuller account of the geologic features is given on the reverse side of the topographic map of Grand Teton National Park, for sale at the museum.