Grand Teton National Park

Grand Teton National Park covers 310,044 acres in northwestern Wyoming, immediately south of Yellowstone, built around twelve Teton Range peaks that exceed 12,000 feet and rise with no foothills directly from the flat floor of Jackson Hole valley at around 6,800 feet elevation. The centerpiece is Grand Teton at 13,775 feet, the highest summit in the range. The park contains Jenny Lake and Jackson Lake — two glacially carved bodies of water at the base of the mountains — along with 200 miles of trails, the Snake River, and some of the most productive grizzly bear and moose habitat in the lower 48 states. It ranks 9th among the 63 national parks with about 3.4 million visitors per year.

The sheer east face of the Teton Range, which rises roughly 7,000 feet from the valley floor to the summit of Grand Teton in a nearly vertical wall with no gradual approach — one of the most dramatic mountain fronts in North America.
World-class wildlife density in Jackson Hole valley, where grizzly bears, black bears, wolves, moose, bison, elk, and pronghorn are regularly visible from the roadside, and bear 399 and her offspring have become among the most photographed grizzlies in the world.
Cascade Canyon and the trail to Lake Solitude, the park's most-used backcountry corridor, accessible by boat shuttle across Jenny Lake and rising 3,000 feet into the alpine zone beneath the tallest peaks.
Technical climbing on Grand Teton and its neighbors, with the Exum Ridge and Owen-Spalding routes on Grand Teton ranking among the most iconic moderate alpine climbs in the United States.

By car from Jackson: The south entrance at Moose is 12 miles north of Jackson on US-89/191. From Jackson, turn north at the Jackson town square and follow US-191 through the National Elk Refuge to Moose Junction. The Moose Entrance Station is 1 mile west. A second southern entrance, the Granite Canyon Entrance, is on WY-390 near Teton Village.

By car from Yellowstone: The north entrance connects to Yellowstone's South Entrance via the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway, a 7-mile NPS corridor. The drive from Yellowstone's Old Faithful area to the Grand Teton north entrance is about 60 miles. Entry through this route does not require a separate stop at a Grand Teton entrance station; a combined Yellowstone–Grand Teton pass covers both parks.

By air: Jackson Hole Airport (JAC) is within the park boundary, 12 miles north of Jackson, and is the only commercial airport inside a U.S. national park. Direct seasonal flights operate from Dallas/Fort Worth, Denver, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, and several other hubs; service varies by season. Rental cars are available at the airport. Salt Lake City International (SLC) is approximately 290 miles south — a 4.5-hour drive — and is the nearest large hub airport for passengers who cannot get direct JAC service.

By bus and shuttle: START Bus operates between Jackson and various points in the park in summer; the Alltrans/Teton Village shuttle connects Jackson to Teton Village. Neither service reaches the northern areas of the park. No train service operates to Jackson.

The Teton Range is one of the youngest mountain ranges in the Rocky Mountain system, having risen to its current height in roughly 9 million years — far less time than the 50 to 70 million years typical of neighboring ranges. The mountains formed along the Teton Fault, a normal fault running along the base of the range's east face. As the fault moved, the western block (the Teton Range) was pushed upward while the eastern block (Jackson Hole) dropped down. The valley has subsided as much as 24,000 feet relative to the mountain summits; the valley floor sits on thousands of feet of sediment fill, most of it glacial debris, that conceals how far the rock actually dropped.

Because the range is geologically young, erosion has not had time to cut deep foothills at the mountain base. The result is the abrupt wall that defines the Teton landscape: the valley is essentially flat, then the peaks begin immediately, without transition. The east face of Grand Teton rises nearly 7,000 feet from the valley floor to the summit in a near-continuous slope — one of the greatest base-to-summit rises of any peak in the contiguous United States.

The rock making up the peaks is among the oldest exposed in North America. The basement gneiss and granite at the core of Grand Teton crystallized about 2.7 billion years ago, during the Archean eon. Overlying Precambrian sedimentary rocks, about 800 million years old, are visible on the lower flanks. The relative youth of the fault that lifted these ancient rocks explains the unusual geological juxtaposition of extremely old rock in an extremely young mountain setting.

Glaciation shaped the modern landscape. During the Pleistocene, valley glaciers filled Cascade Canyon, Death Canyon, and the other canyon systems to depths of thousands of feet, carving the characteristic U-shaped profiles visible from the valley today. The glaciers also deposited moraines that dammed Jenny Lake and created String Lake and Leigh Lake. Jackson Lake fills a glacially carved basin that was subsequently raised by a dam. Small glaciers remain above 11,000 feet on Grand Teton and neighboring peaks, though all have retreated significantly over the past century.

Grand Teton and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem surrounding it support one of the last nearly complete assemblages of large mammals in the contiguous United States. Grizzly bears are seen frequently in the valley; bear 399 and her successive litters of cubs have been photographed at close range along Pilgrim Creek Road and the Oxbow Bend area for years and are among the most individually recognized grizzlies on Earth. Black bears are common in the canyon forests and at the forest-sagebrush edge. Both species are most visible in May and June when they feed in the open valley before retreating to higher elevations in summer.

Moose are reliably spotted in the willows along Cottonwood Creek near Moose Junction, in the willows below Jackson Lake Dam, and along the Snake River. They are present year-round. Elk herds graze on the sagebrush flats through summer and migrate to the National Elk Refuge south of Jackson in winter; the fall rut in September produces bugling heard across the valley at dawn and dusk. Bison herds totaling several hundred animals graze the Antelope Flats and Moran Junction areas year-round and are a near-constant roadside presence.

Gray wolves returned to the ecosystem in the 1990s and several packs use the park. The Junction Butte and Wapiti Lake packs range through the northern areas; sightings near Willow Flats and Oxbow Bend are occasional but not rare. Pronghorn migrate through the valley in spring and fall in one of the longest overland mammal migrations in the lower 48, traveling from the Upper Green River Basin south of the park to winter range.

Bald eagles and ospreys nest along the Snake River and Jackson Lake and are visible throughout the summer. Trumpeter swans winter on open sections of the Snake River. Sandhill cranes breed in the wet meadows near Moose. The park's alpine zone supports yellow-bellied marmots, pikas, and Clark's nutcrackers — the nutcracker's habit of caching thousands of whitebark pine seeds across the high country makes it a key agent in forest regeneration above treeline.

Archaeological evidence shows human presence in Jackson Hole dating back at least 11,000 years, beginning with Paleoindian hunters who entered the valley as glaciers retreated after the last ice age. Multiple tribes — including the Shoshone, Bannock, and Blackfeet — used the area seasonally for hunting, fishing, and gathering through the historic period. The area was part of a complex of travel routes through the Rocky Mountain passes, and obsidian from nearby Yellowstone has been found at archaeological sites across North America, documenting long-distance trade networks.

The first non-Native Americans to enter Jackson Hole were trappers and fur traders of the 1820s and 1830s. John Colter, a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition who returned to explore on his own, passed through the greater region in 1807–1808. David Jackson, a beaver trapper who wintered repeatedly in the valley, gave his name to Jackson Lake and Jackson Hole. The fur trade collapsed by the mid-1840s when beaver hat fashions changed, and the valley saw little settlement for several decades.

Homesteaders began arriving in the 1880s, establishing ranches in the valley. By the early 20th century, conservationists and ranchers alike recognized that Jackson Hole's character was threatened by unchecked development. Congress established Grand Teton National Park in 1929, but the original park covered only the mountains themselves — the valley remained outside protection, subdivided and exposed to commercial development.

John D. Rockefeller Jr. began quietly purchasing valley land in the late 1920s through a front company called the Snake River Land Company, accumulating more than 30,000 acres he intended to donate to the federal government for park expansion. Political opposition from ranching and livestock interests blocked the transfer for two decades. In 1943, with congressional action still stalled, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act to create Jackson Hole National Monument, protecting the valley floor over fierce Wyoming opposition. Congress finally merged the monument with the national park in 1950, creating the current Grand Teton National Park, and accepted Rockefeller's land donation in 1949–1950. The John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway connecting Grand Teton to Yellowstone was designated by Congress in 1972.