Backpacking in the Grand Teton Daniel & Virginia
Pushing on
Our hike in the Grand Teton
by Daniel Borgström, with input from Virginia Browning
Out on the western edge of Wyoming you'll find the Grand Teton, a bizarrely jagged range of mountains that rise up sharply from the valley of the Snake River with no foothills in front of them.
And that's where Virginia proposed to go backpacking and camping--a three-day hike along the ridges and canyons of the Teton Range. She'd done that as a teenager, decades ago, and now she wanted to go back and revisit those mountains. Day after day, she studied maps and reports, watched videos, phoned various agencies, and made reservations at various campsites which were certain to be crowded during the summer season.
"You're crazy!" exclaimed Ann Garrison, a close friend and member of our scrabble group. "How old are you? About seventy two, right?" Ann went on to remind Virginia that only weeks before this she'd been flat on her back in bed, recovering from an ailment. "And you're going to take Daniel with you. You're both too fucking old!"
Virginia didn't attempt to assert the reasonableness of her project; she just went ahead with her plans, which included me. I turn eighty four this summer. To me it sounded rather strenuous but feasible. I've done a fair amount of traveling, hiking, and camping in forests as well as deserts -- though never with one of those super-large backpacks. That was new to me, and Virginia hadn't used one for some time either.
To try this out, and get some idea of what it might be like, we rented a pair of packs for a few days, filled them up with ballast, and went on walks with them -- a couple of miles in the park by the bay. Although that was nothing like the rugged mountain trails at 10,000 feet, it seemed like a fair test, and we concluded that we could handle it.
Then, only a few days before we were to leave, I stumbled on the hallway floor and fell, slamming my left shoulder into a door post. It was extremely painful; I could hardly use my arm, and that night I could barely get into or out of bed. "Should we cancel the trip?" Virginia wondered. "Tomorrow I'll see a doctor, and then we'll decide," I suggested.
X-rays showed that no bones were broken. And painful though the injury was right now, it seemed likely that I'd soon be okay. Plans-making continued. Finally, we packed our stuff into the back of the trusty old 2003 Honda van, and set out on the road. We'd sleep in the van as we alway did in most of our travels.
Our itinerary included a loop through northern Idaho where we visited some of my cousins, and then a visit to Yellowstone where we spent about a week, visiting geysers and other hydrothermal spots, some of them so small they looked like a campfire which nobody had bothered to put out. The park and the hydrothermal area is large, some fifty miles wide, and on the eastern side, herds of buffalo often share the roads with cars. Actually, the cars do the sharing and the buffalo have the right-of-way. We saw a line of several dozen autos crawling down a road while a single buffalo strolled along ahead, seemingly unaware of or totally indifferent to the inconvenience he was causing to the human motorists.
Another time we were returning from a day-hike when we saw two buffalo coming towards us on the narrow path. "What do we do now?" We stepped off the path, into a growth of weeds and brush. The buffalo continued on the trail. Then, as they drew near, they left the trail in the other direction, doing essentially what we had done. They walked through the weeds on their side, and once past us, returned to the trail. These animals were huge and fearsome looking, but they seemed willing to share the park with us.
There were also herds of elk, as well as bears and cute little squirrels, chipmunks and even a marmot. Along with seeing the hydrothermal vents and the animals, part of our intention for spending nearly a week in Yellowstone was to acclimatize ourselves to the high elevations where we'd be in the Teton Range. Much of Yellowstone is at around 8,000 feet.
Immediately south of Yellowstone is the Grand Teton. The range runs north-south for a distance of some thirty miles, rising skyward on the western side of the Snake River Valley.
First we had to get our camping permit, and the outcome of that was a major surprise, and not a good one. Two-thirds of back-country camping permits are granted first-come, first-serve the day before the hike, (the first third had been reserved online months before). We got up at 4 a.m., as instructed, to get to the office early, and were second in line. Even so, we didn't get a trail we wanted. In many phone conversations months ahead during our planning, Virginia had been assured the rangers could put together something of what she was looking for. Not factored in were 1) that campers had scooped up second and third days in "our" spot, and 2) possibly the ranger assigning permits this morning was not as creative as the one Virginia had spoken with by phone. The trail we got was apparently a less popular trail that we could've reserved online at any time without having to get up at 4 a.m.
Then we went to Jackson Hole to the FedX and picked up the gear we were renting, and ran some other tasks which took up the rest of the day. Nothing is simple these days. And the next morning we set out on our mountaineering adventure.
The modern backpacks of today are quite sophisticated with a plethora of straps and buckles and adjustments. We filled them with food, a small tent, and other gear including a "bear barrel." This last is a bear-proof food container which backpackers are required to use. And we had to carry a can of bear-spray -- which would hopefully deter charging grizzly bears. There are also smaller brown bears in these mountains, but they tend not to bother humans -- other than to attempt to steal food. This stuff adds up to a heavy load. Someone estimated these packs to weigh 35 or 40 pounds. Well, we didn't weigh them so I really don't know, but they sure felt heavy, and it was a struggle to lift them onto our backs. The weight of the pack is designed to rest on your hips, not your shoulders, and as we tried them out, I found that it didn't seem to interfere with my injured shoulder -- which was now getting much better, though not totally healed.
We hurriedly stuffed things into our packs; everything took longer than expected and it was already well past noon as we set out for our starting point.
The plan was to drive to the trailhead of Granite Canyon; this is where we'd come out at the end of our hike. Here we could park for free. But somehow we needed to get to Teton Village in Jackson Hole, another five miles away. That's where we would start out from. Hopefully, we could hitch a ride. And as it happened, we did. Just as we arrived at the parking lot, a couple was getting into a pickup next to us; we asked them. "Sure, get in," they said.
We tossed our heavy packs in the back of the truck, and hurriedly grabbed a couple of other last minute items including maps.
We arrived in Teton Village, at the base of the Aerial Tramway. This tram/ski lift would take us 4,000 feet up the mountainside from the valley floor -- 6,000 feet above sea level -- to the Rendezvous Mountain Trailhead at 10,455 feet.
So we got in and rode the tram upwards, getting a tremendous view of the valley of the Snake River. On the mountainside we saw a couple of mountain climbers, making this same trip as we were, but doing it the hard way. At the top we stepped out into bright sunlight and a cool breeze, and looked for our trailhead. We expected it to be well marked, but it wasn't. "So let's see the map," said Virginia, and I handed her the topo map.
"Not that one. The other," she said. So I handed her another map, but that wasn't what she wanted either.
"You didn't bring it?" she asked. I'd grabbed the wrong one. We had a topo map, but we also wanted the map that came with our camping permit. We'd also forgotten her jacket. There wasn't time to go back and get those things -- to go back down the tram and to the parking lot 5 miles away. It was already 4 p.m. and it would be dark at around 8 o'clock. We had to get moving.
There was one rather prominent trail, and we guessed that must be it. We saddled up our heavy packs and set out. We'd be basically heading down hill from here, from over 10,000 feet. This was originally planned as an eighteen mile hike down to the valley floor at the mouth of Granite Canyon. As expected, the trail started out down hill.
But was this the right trail? Or maybe not? Should we go back up and look for another trail? Anyway, we continued on, and came to a trail marker which confirmed that we were on the right one. We trudged on, onward and downward, on the narrow mountain trail. I had my trusty compass, but on this switchback trail, north and south didn't mean too much. The only two directions that seemed to really matter were up and down. I hoped we weren't lost.
Although it was downhill, every step I took left me out of breath in the thin air. 10,000 feet is two miles up in the sky. Just for comparison, Donner Pass where the highway 80 crosses the Sierra Nevada is barely 7,000 feet; and there are several passes on highway 50 crossing Nevada which are also just over 7,000. The north rim of the Grand Canyon averages 8,000 feet. Of course several peaks around us -- which we couldn't see from where we stood -- rose to over twelve thousand feet and more, but I can't think of too many places where we'd be up this high.
Of course if you want to think of really high places, there's the Tibetan Plateau, which averages about 15,000 feet. Lhasa is 12,000 feet up.
It was partly to acclimatize ourselves to these elevations that we'd spent that week in Yellowstone, around 8,000 feet high, and maybe that helped somewhat. But thin air wasn't our only problem. We'd been going for maybe an hour when Virginia told me her shoes weren't working out well and it was something neither moleskin nor Band-Aids would alleviate.
That for Virginia is a serious matter; the skin on her feet is extremely sensitive and always in danger of infection. "If I continue like this, they'll have to carry me out," she said. She'd bought her shoes new for this trip, and had tried them out. In trial walks the shoes had seemed to work, but now clearly not on this slippery, sliding mountain trail. Should we go back? It would be a grueling uphill journey behind us to retrace, and it would mean giving up on the project.
I was wearing my usual sandals, rather small ones, as my feet are a couple sizes smaller than hers. "How about if we trade shoes?" That's what we did, and I put on hers which, though large for me, seemed to fit well enough. Fortunately, my sandals seemed to work for her; "Not great, it was like I was wearing thin-soled moccasins," she said afterwards, but they worked. And on we went.
A tremendous amount of research, planning and preparation had gone into this project -- weeks of it -- nevertheless, these unexpected glitches were coming up, one after another. Looking back on it, I suppose that's almost to be expected when trying something new. We had both done a lot of day-hiking, spent time in woods and deserts, in the back country of Utah and other places. We knew this would be difficult, but we thought we could do it.
The first leg of our hike would take us to a permitted campsite after about 3 or 4 miles. But how far had we come? A couple of miles? We were used to taking daily walks and we'd normally cover a mile in about half an hour, but that was on flat ground, and clearly, these mountain trails were an entirely different matter. Although we'd been walking for a some time, we apparently hadn't come very far at all, and were not arriving at a campsite area. This mountainside was sloping, nowhere flat or suitable for camping. Then we came to a bend in the trail, a rockslide and a dry wash. There was a flat space large enough for a tent.
Up ahead, we could see the trail continuing up alongside a mountainside; it didn't seem to offer promising campsites.
"It's getting late. What do you say we camp here?" Virginia said. We probably weren't supposed to camp here, according to our permit, but night was coming on, and so this is where we camped, right at the edge of the wash. If there were to be a cloud burst, at least we wouldn't be in the middle of it, we hoped.
We unwrapped our tent and set it up. It came in two pieces: a mosquito netting type body, and then a rain-proof cover to put over it. I puzzled with the cover; no matter how I did it, it didn't seem to fit. Well, I didn't get it right, but it basically worked.
There were also sleeping mats to inflate and roll out. We made the site workable, though we were sleeping on some rocks. Virginia often describes herself as "the princess on a pea" -- as in the Hans Christian Andersen story, but these weren't tiny peas, these were rocks.
My injured shoulder hadn't bothered me when I carried the backpack, but when I lay down, it hurt painfully whenever I tried to turn over.
Nevertheless, it was a good, cozy tent. Warm enough, and though we'd forgotten Virginia's jacket, it turned out that she didn't really need it. The nights weren't as cold as we'd expected. This was late in August.
In addition to our headlamps, we'd brought a solar lantern; it was perfect for camping. No battery needed, we just had to expose it to the sun each day. And it was very lightweight.
Morning came, daylight. We packed up, cramming our gear into the backpacks. One of the sleeping mats just refused to go back into the small bag it came in.
As we were doing this, there came two backpackers from the other direction. They were women, and they told us they'd come from Idaho across these mountains and had been on the trail for three days now. Truly, they were hardy souls.
And we started out. The trail along the mountainside that we'd seen up ahead of us the night before was more formidable than it had looked. If the mountainside itself was not exactly a cliff, it was damn close to being such. It was steep, very steep. And the trail very narrow. Loose your footing on that, and you'll roll and bounce, roll and bounce, for a good long way down into the ravine below. And the trail was uphill. We were climbing now, and stepping over slippery, loose rocks.
Without heavy packs, this would've been bad enough. But wearing a pack which right now didn't seem to sit well on my back and was likely to pull me from side to side as it swayed, it was scary. I don't like high places, and this trail kept getting us higher and higher above the ravine. Scary! Just scary! I hate high places!
It was a bare steep slope, almost no trees. Nothing to catch hold of if I slipped. I was out of breath; at every step in this thin mountain air I was panting. Just standing up took my breath away.
"Will you ever forgive me for getting you into this?" Virginia remarked. I promised her I would. Of course, this was also my project, not just hers. Nevertheless, weird and ominous songs echoed through my mind, among them the Pete Seeger song: "Waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool said to push on!"
Of course I wasn't waist deep in any river, I was on the edge of a cliff on some endless mountainside out in god-knows-where Wyoming, and high above the bottom of the dry wash below us. There was no water around us, muddy or whatever. I was thirsty. The day was warm but not hot. Nevertheless, no matter how many drinks of water I took, I was still thirsty. We had water in our water bottles. But this mountain was dry. No streams yet.
Push on. Just push on. What else could we do? Except for the current stretch, the way back , the way we'd come would be up, up, up. We couldn't go back the way we came. We just couldn't. Not an option. But now we were climbing, and for how long?
"Are you okay?" we kept asking each other, back and forth. "Yes, I'm fine." At times we paused to rest. And then we saddled up again and pushed on.
There's something about following a trail up a mountainside; it keeps looking as though it's just a bit further and then you'll be on top. But it fools you, and then you keep on climbing.
Eventually, and finally, the trail did actually take us up to the top of a ridge, a somewhat flat one. As we continued on, we eventually came to what should've been our permitted campsite. But it had taken us some time to get here and had we not camped where we had, in that wash back there, darkness would've caught us out on the steep mountainside trail we'd just come up. What would we have done in that situation? It still disturbs me to even think of that.
And so after all this time we'd only come about 3 or 4 miles? We did not seem to be making good time at all. Mountain trails are not easy going. If we stuck to the original intended route, we probably had another fifteen or so miles to go.
We were now meeting hikers coming from the other direction, from where we were going. Some were backpackers, campers like us; others were day hikers, people with light packs who would cover the entire distance in a single day. We'd exchange greetings, and sometimes get info on the condition of the trail ahead. About two thirds of the hikers were women.
The day wore on, sunny but still not hot, just dry and thirsty. Very thirsty. We stopped often to rest, usually taking our packs off. Then we'd have to go through the laborious task of saddling up again. So far we'd seen no creeks flowing with water, though people we met assured us there were creeks up ahead.
Hikers coming from behind were passing us up. It made me feel as though I were getting old as I saw these 25 and 30-year-olds out-walking us. Were we really getting old?
Some of them expressed admiration that people of our age would take on a hike like this. But there were also people who wondered if we could make it. We were resting by the trailside when a father and a daughter coming from the other way asked us if we were okay. John and Lizzy, they introduced themselves, and we spoke for a while. They asked how old we were, and I told them, eighty four. John shook his head, remembering that at that age his father had been laid up and hardly capable of any sort of walking. They asked us to promise to phone them as soon as we came out of the mountains.
They asked us if we had water, which we did, though we were running low, and they gave us a water bottle, which we did not want to accept since they would certainly need it. And we were certain to find water up ahead. But they insisted, and we finally accepted it.
Virginia was hoping to see beautiful views of the unique Teton peaks rising up around us, though she knew we would not see much of them from this trail. We really didn't see any. Sometimes we were in the open and sometimes passing through wooded areas, but we didn't see the towering peaks.
What we did see were canyons, and numerous rock-falls, or slides, such as the one where we'd camped by the dry wash. These rocks of the Teton Range are mostly metamorphic, and are among the oldest in the US; they're 2.7 billion years old -- that's billions, not millions. It's kind of thrilling to pick up a rock and know that you're holding billions of years in your hand.
Nevertheless, picking our way over these mostly sharp rocks two and a half billion years later, we missed some of the views around us.
At around 3:20 p.m. we came to a junction in the trail, with markers indicating that we were now about to enter the lower north fork of Granite Canyon. Here we found ourselves walking on a moraine, a deposit left by glaciers during the ice age. Essentially, the moraine was a huge pile of dirt mixed with jagged pebbles and boulders of all sizes. As we followed it out, we came to where it became large steps or terraces. The ground surface would be flat for a while, then it would suddenly drop down a few feet to a lower level and continue flat again for a bit further, then do the same again, several times. I think this was due to cycles of the glacier advancing and retreating. It was a memento from a glacier that had moved down through this canyon during the ice age which ended some ten thousand years ago.
Finally we came to a creek flowing with water, crossed by a bridge consisting of a single log split in half. Water at last! Using our water filter, we filtered it into our bottles. I have no idea whether that filter may have been a necessary precaution, but we used it anyway.
Night was coming on. It wouldn't get pitch dark till about 8, but it takes a while to set up the tent, and as soon as we found a flat open space, we camped. We carefully took out any stones -- there weren't many. This time I took some time and after some experimentation I figured out how to properly put the upper part of the tent on correctly. Progress! I was very proud of myself! I have to say, it was a good, cozy tent.
This was our second night on the trail. We expected to finish our hike and be out of the canyon the next day. We had already decided to nix the third night of our camping.
Morning. We packed up and set out again. As on the previous day, we met other hikers, more than half of them women. We also met two or three backpackers in their 70s. "This is probably going to be my last hike," a fellow told me. But when I told him I was eighty four, he chuckled and said, "Then I have 14 more years left!"
There were berry bushes around us, and we began to see bear pucky on the trail. Then, "There's a bear," Virginia whispered. And sure enough, there it was, about twenty feet off to the left of us, busily grabbing swaths of berry bushes and shoveling them into its mouth. It didn't pay us any attention.
Soon after that the sky clouded over, and rain began to fall. We took out our ponchos and covered up our packs, but the shower was brief, soon over. Once again, we got up and moved on.
This was now well into Granite Canyon; and our trail crossed numerous rock-falls. Despite the name of this canyon, few of these rocks were granite. Mostly they continued to be gneiss, a metamorphic rock. The granite in the Teton Range is a couple hundred million years younger than the gneiss; but it's still pretty old -- two and a half billion years. That's nearly four times as old as the Cambrian epoch, which began about 540 million years ago.
I've always loved the mountains, but right now my love of mountains was wearing thin, and I wanted to get down out of here just as quick as our aching legs would take us. But Virginia wanted to stop and make breakfast. I guess she wanted to try out our tiny propane camp stove. She added some water and cooked some powdered scrambled eggs; actually, they were quite delicious. She also made some tea, then we packed up and got back on the trail.
It couldn't be much farther to the trailhead now. Hikers we met told us it was about six miles, and six miles shouldn't be all that much. But here we were carrying these heavy packs, and walking on these rocky and uncertain mountain trails made it slower and longer. The day wore on, and I figured we must be getting close, but the trail went on and on. My legs were sore, my thighs ached.
There were no more really steep places such as we'd encountered the morning of the day before above that deep ravine. The whole path, from beginning to end, with some exceptions, was almost consistently downward. That was to be expected; in the course of our hike we were coming from 10,000 feet down to 6,000. I wasn't so short of breath now.
The mouth of this canyon had to be just up ahead, or so I thought. But each time I thought that, the trail went on. The afternoon was wearing on. Four o'clock, then five o'clock and still no end to this trail. My thighs ached more intensely. Virginia likewise. We felt like we were approaching the extreme limits of our endurance.
At long, long last we came to a junction in the trail; a marker indicated that there were only 1.6 miles left. Still over a mile to go? It would soon be getting dark. We trudged on. And on. Legs aching more intensely. It was like the longest mile and a half we'd ever walked, and when we came to the end of that, it turned out there was still more to go. Despite our aches and pains, we were at this point rushing like horses finally on their way back to their oats and hay.
The sun was disappearing behind the mountains as we finally emerged at the trailhead where we'd left our car. We first phoned John and Lizzy as promised, then friends back in California, letting them know we were out and alive. We had not had cell phone service during this hike or for many days off and on before that, but here our phones worked.
The next morning we woke up full of aches and pains; we drove to Jackson Hole where we went to the Fed X and returned the packs and camping equipment we'd rented. That done, we had breakfast at a restaurant. Virginia suggested that after resting up for a day, we take a relatively short day hike over by Jenny Lake, near the entrance of Cascade Canyon. From there we'd get a good view of the lofty mountain peaks among the clouds.
Daniel Borgström, with input from Virginia Browning
September 22, 2025
Labels: Daniel Borgström, Grand Teton backpacking, Virginia Browning
