Grand Teton National Park

When I got up this morning, the blusteriness of last night was gone and it was clear, cool, and calm.  A rather nice change, since it always seems to be windy in Wyoming.  I took an aerial picture of the lake with the campground.  Rather pretty in a very remote sort of way.  The drive here from Shoshoni was ten miles of dry nothing for as far as the eye could see.  I even had to dodge a few cows that had wandered onto the road.

We pulled into a Walmart in Riverton for some supplies.  I also purchased two AIS watercraft decals for our kayaks. Aquatic Invasive Species decals are required for any watercraft in Wyoming, however the process appears to have nothing to do with Aquatic Invasive Species.  The guy did ask me if the boats were inspected, but, beyond that, you pay the $15 each, get questioned on your weight, social security number, and hair color, and then you get stickers to put on your kayak.  How my weight and hair color has anything to do with Aquatic Invasive Species remains a mystery to me.

The stickers will show up in my mailbox in about a week.  ​In Michigan!​  Lotta good that will do me here.  I plan on putting the kayak in Jackson Lake today.  Fortunately, the printed receipt is proof of purchase, good for 15 days or until the decal arrives in the mail.  15 days from now, we won’t need them anyway since we will be in Idaho.

We topped off on fuel and continued on our way.  About 8 miles out of town was a campground that Deb found that could be a source of fresh water.  She called the campground.  Yes, they had water and yes, we could have some.  Turns out the campground was five miles off the road in the middle of a bunch of irrigation circles.  “It’s really quiet here,” the woman who greeted us said.  Yes, I would imagine so.

About an hour down the road is the town of Dubois.  25 years ago, we wheezed into this town in a ’78 Winnebago and it died in a gas station.  We looked for that gas station.  A lot has changed here, and 25 years also dims the memories, but we didn’t find anything remotely resembling the ramshackle gas station where people were so helpful to us.  

One thing that Dubois still had is the National Bighorn Sheep Center.  We parked in the parking lot right behind the center and made lunch.

We arrived at Grand Teton National Park early in the afternoon.  We don’t really have a set agenda for this portion of the trip, but one of the major things we wanted to visit was Grand Teton National Park.  25 years ago, we had planned to spend some time here, but all the travails relating to our ’78 Winnebago put us behind schedule so we merely drove through the park on our way to Yellowstone.  Now we have more time and better equipment so we will be spending some time here.

First thing to do once we arrived at the visitor center was to get the paperwork out of the way.  Grand Teton requires its own brand of watercraft permit.  After figuring out which window to buy the permit, I was expecting to show the receipt for the Wyoming AIS decal.  They never even asked about it.  This was another pay-for-a-sticker thing.  Twenty five dollars per boat will get you a yellow sticker to paste on the kayak.  Seems like the fee goes to pay the people who administer the fee.  I’m not sure what else it does.  At least they didn’t ask for my weight and hair color this time.

We launched the kayaks at the Colter Bay boat ramp and paddled out into Jackson Lake.  This was one of our bucket list things: to kayak on Jackson Lake.  We were warned that it could be windy and choppy, in fact a kayaker recently lost his life on this lake due to this, only he wasn’t wearing a life jacket.

The lake was almost as smooth as glass.  Very quiet and peaceful.

Kind of a sharp contrast to the roadways and Colter Bay Village which were quite busy.  A guy behind the counter expressed surprise that it was this busy at this time of the season.  “Usually it’s really tapered off by now,” he told us.  On the water, however, we had nearly the whole lake to ourselves.

We had dinner in the picnic area next to the visitor center then hiked the lakeshore trail, most of which did not follow the lakeshore.  The parts that did offered great views of the mountains across the lake.

It was about a half hour drive to our targeted camping spot for the night: a large gravel parking lot a couple miles down Forest Service Road 30290.  If you don’t want to pay the $100/night to camp in the National Park, you come here and camp for free.  And there are a lot of campers here.

At one point on that drive, traffic came to a sudden stop.  A couple people in a minivan stopped their vehicle in the lane and were standing by the side of the road, photographing a moose.  They were clueless that this was both illegal and extremely dangerous.  I hope it was a really good picture.