Grand Teton national Park Jenny Lake hike

Today we headed down to grand Teton national Park, which sits just south of Yellowstone National Park. The two parks do not actually connect, but are very very close to each other.

Since it just snowed yesterday, there’s a lot of fresh snow on the Tetons and it doesn’t matter where you are and Grand Teton National Park the view of the Tetons is always stunning. I’m not sure what it is about these mountains that makes them so unique compared to all other mountains. But I sure do love them.

We are headed over to Jenny Lake for a hike. Our intention was to arrive and take the boat taxi across the lake and then start our hike there. This would shave off a total of 4 miles from our hike. The hike we wanted to do was only 2 1/2 miles and we would take the boat back across the lake. It would have been a great combination of a little boat ride and a hike. Unfortunately, when we arrived at 9 AM the line to get on the boat was already over an hour wait.

We stood in line for about 5 to 10 minutes before we decided we will just hike the extra 4 miles. 2 miles there 2 miles back and skip the boat. I’m really glad that we made that decision because once we got onto the hiking trail we came upon a cow moose and her baby. It was awesome to see them both together. The baby is so tiny compared to the mother.

Once we made it to the other side of the lake, we are planning to hike hidden Falls, inspiration point and a little bit of cascade Canyon.

The water at hidden Falls was rushing. The falls look beautiful, and the sound was a constant roar. Next, we headed up to inspiration point. It was a bit of a climb and a little bit of a ledge so I was scared, but Mike held my hand and we made it across. The view from inspiration point was so inspiring. You could see all of Jenny Lake and into the valley.

Next, we made our way over to Cascade Canyon. We actually ended up on this trail on accident. We thought we were just going to skip it and head back to the parking lot but we missed the sign and that’s OK because it turned out to be a really cool hike. Cascade Canyon is as it’s named in a canyon with the sheer mountain right next to you. It was just gorgeous. A little bit into the hike we heard some people say there was a moose a little further down the trail. We made it over to the moose, so that is moose number three of the day. Some people were saying she had a baby, but we didn’t see one. The views in the canyon were gorgeous so we kept on hiking.

A little bit further into the hike someone mentioned seeing a bear a little bit further down, so of course we had to continue. We did see the bear, but he was hidden in very thick brush so not too good of a picture. We actually hiked past the bear and didn’t see him the first time until we came up upon some other hikers that asked if we saw the bear and we missed it. It’s kind of scary because he was only about 30 feet off the trail and we had no idea he was there. After that, we are already 5 miles into our hike and we still needed to hike all the way back so we turned around and headed back.

We didn’t run into anything exciting on the way back, except that the three moose that we saw were all still in the same area. So we got to see them again. It ended up being just over 9 miles of a hike. And after yesterday‘s 6 mile hike were beat so we just headed home.Read more