Day Twelve - Grand Tetons

We were up and out early today with a 300+ mile trip ahead of us to the Grand Tetons. We were at the Canyon Lodge for breakfast at 7am and were on the road by 8:30am. Although not as cold as yesterday, the temps hovered around 45F for the first two hours, slowly rising to around 55F when we got to the Grand Tetons National Park south of Yellowstone in Wyoming. Although layered in six items of clothing, Julie did not appreciate the brisk morning and damp, foggy air. We didn’t hear anything from her on the CB until our first stop.

We had heard about construction between Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. After looking at the routes we would have to go 2.5 hours out of our way to miss the construction. We figured the construction delay wouldn’t be nearly that long, so we stuck to the original route heading south out of Yellowstone via the Southwest entrance and take 191 all the way into the Grand Tetons.

Approximately 26 miles south of Yellowstone we hit the construction. The delay wasn’t the issue as they were forcing traffic to share a single lane except for a small 100 foot section. The issue was the 8 miles of mud-packed road! Again, the ever wise Wyoming DOT demolishes the entire road and forces vehicles to drive on hard packed dirt (mud if it has just rained) while they work on the road!

The road was damp and, in one section, very soft and muddy. The bike wallowed and fish-tailed in the mud, but we had no choice except to go with it. Rob told Michele at one point “hang on” in a very serious tone.

If that was not bad enough, the road was also littered with potholes, forcing some evasive maneuvers and a bumpy ride for the ladies. The best speed I was able to do was 25 mph at its smoothest point, but was soon crawling at 15mph through this road from hell.

Once we got to pavement again, Rob almost stopped to kiss it. It felt soooooo smooth! We promised never to complain about a bumpy, potholed asphalt road again. Looks like we’ll be taking a bit of Wyoming back with us as the bikes have a pretty good collection of Wyoming mud stuck to them. ;-)

Now back on blissfully smooth pavement, we approached the park. The Tetons were half covered in clouds in the early morning, and we were all thinking we came all this way to see only half a mountain. As Julie reflected later, “what’s so grand about that?!”

We rolled south on part of the Jenny Lake loop on our way to the visitor’s center in Moose, WY (what a great name for a town!). After looking at the exhibits at the visitor’s center we headed north along WY191 back into the park and up to Jackson Lake Lodge for lunch.

The Jackson Lake Lodge has a spectacular view of the Tetons, and by then the clouds were steadily clearing allowing us a full view of the mountains in all their glory.

 We ate in the Mural room where we could view the Tetons through a floor-to-ceiling wall of windows.

It’s amazing how suddenly they jut upward from the flat valley below with no foothills like other mountain ranges. This view also created a reflection effect from the mountains right outside our lunch window, so people were standing right in front of us pointing a camera at us through the window.

Rob went outside to take pictures of the Tetons and with his “big lens”. The women at the table next to ours commented that with that lens he could examine their dental work!

It was also during lunch that Julie had a Moose sighting!

After lunch, we headed back south down WY191 into Jackson Hole, WY and cruised through the ski town. We stopped short of the WY22 exit to top off with fuel and allow Michele and Julie to add more layers in expectation of cooler temps when going through the pass over the Tetons into Idaho. The temps in Jackson at this time were 70F. Very nice!

We wound our way up the pass, enjoying amazing views up the mountain and into Idaho. We then turned north and drove along the back side of the Tetons. We continued north on Idaho 20.

We saw vast rolling fields of various crops including, what we suspect, were potatoes. We even had a little rain cloud decide to give us a shower (of course we couldn’t go one day without some rain), luckily just for a few minutes.

We left the beautiful country side of Idaho behind and entered Montana briefly as we entered West Yellowstone. West Yellowstone is just outside of Yellowstone N.P. The temperatures were now hovering around the high 50s. We decided to push on through back to the lodge to avoid another nighttime ride and rapidly dropping temps.

The temps dropped to 50F once in the park and it was evident that rain had been through not too long before. We made our way through a few “Elk Jams” and arrived back at our cabin at 7:30pm.

Tom and Julie headed out to the do a load of laundry and then we all headed to the Canyon lodge for our last dinner at Yellowstone. The bikes have been “converted” for touring duty and our items are packed up and ready for departure early tomorrow.

Tomorrow we alter our original plans and instead heading out of the park via the Southeast entrance towards Cody via the Buffalo Bill State Park. This is due to construction between Cook City and Beartooth. We are also looking forward to riding through the Buffalo Bill park again--hopefully the weather will be more kind to us on our exit than it was on our entrance. We’ll then head north up 16, take the Chief Joseph Highway to the Beartooth Pass and then Beartooth down into Red Lodge. We will drop Julie off at Billings airport for her flight home. Tom, Michele, and Rob will continue onward to Forsyth, MT for the night.