There are no bears in the sky: National Parks Trip, day 8

After all of the time I spent convincing Derek that we needed to do sunrise on Jenny Lake, we did not do that. We slept through our alarms and got going for the day right as the sun was coming up. The first picture I took of the day was at 8:28am, so actually, we likely got going after the sun had already risen. Was I a little disappointed? Yeah. I think Jenny Lake would have been absolutely amazing, and absolutely private with nobody getting in my way and being inconsiderate. No time to lament what could have been, though, this was our last full day at Grand Teton. We decided to hike Taggert Lake, with a possible jump over to Bradley Lake. 

On our way to Taggert, we talked about the massive line down one of the mountains (I THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINK it was Mount Moran, but I cannot be sure) and wondered what it actually was. One of the things they teach you in almost any drawing/painting class is "nature doesn't make straight lines", but how like...when you pull away from the details, nature makes straight lines all the time. 

Case in point:

Suck on THAT straight line, artists!

We didn't know what it was, and sinceI had to go turn in my Grand Tetons Junior Ranger book (!!!!!!) at a ranger station, anyway, I figured I would look around at all of the information to find out, and if I couldn't, I would then ask a ranger. 

I didn't mention this before, but a ton of trails and trailheads at Grand Teton were under construction while we were there. I mentioned it when we went and looked at Moulton Barn, but that wasn't the only construction going on. Quite a few things were closed because they were working on them. We had actually been operating under the assumption that Taggert Lake Trail was closed, because there was a closure notice on our park map for Taggert Lake, so I had scrapped it off of our to-do list...but we kept seeing cars in the parking lot, so we popped in to find that it is quite open, it's just a section of it that's closed. 

Closed for blasting, eh? Dirty Grand Teton.

We got started on the trail at pretty much 9am sharp, and while the parking lot had quite a few cars in it, it was far from as packed as we had seen it get the two days before. I again opted to pack light...much lighter than any other day, in fact. I didn't bring my camera bag at all. Taggert Lake was about a 5 mile hike, and all I brought was a bottle of water, my phone, and an IQ Bar in case I needed a snack. I didn't ask Derek to bring my camera, I just didn't bring it. I wanted to just enjoy myself taking a hike in the morning with my spousal unit, in a beautiful location, without assessing light, or determining angles, or finding the best spot. They would all be the best spots. And I actually really enjoyed myself doing it this way. We DID decide at the car to not do Bradley lake. That would be a 7.5 mile hike, and while that would have been absolutely fine for our bodies despite the horrors of The Hatchet, we wanted to get to the other activities on our docket for the day, and we didn't know how long 7.5 miles would actually take us. 

We got going on to Taggert. It was a gorgeous day. 

We were really intent on looking at all of animal tracks and trails, so the trail through the forest took us a bit longer than expected. Which was totally ok, it was beautiful and the animal signs were plentiful. 

Not an animal sign.

I was a little surprised by this trail. I don't quite look at topography maps, and it was Derek who looked at ascent and descent of each trail, so when we had to go up up up up, I wasn't really surprised...

....it was the going back down down down that surprised me. 

On the way down to the lake, I thought I got yelled at by a park ranger. I had moved to the right for a pair of hikers coming up the trail, they stopped, so Derek and I went around them. The park ranger boomed down to us, "HIKERS GOING UPHILL ALWAYS HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY, PARK RANGER HERE!" I boomed back up, "I THOUGHT I MOVED TO THE SIDE ENOUGH, I'M SORRY!" Lucky for me, it was a misunderstanding. She was telling the hikers who stopped that they didn't need to stop. I know this because we actually stopped her to chat and she told me we had done everything right, but some people don't know they have the right of way when they're going uphill if they're not avid hikers. We talked to her for about fifteen minutes (not to brag, but she did say she loves talking to people like us), and I asked her what the big ol' line on Mt. Moran was. She told us it's a dike. She told us all about Skillet Glacier...which I've been calling panhandle glacier, and I don't know if that's what she called it, or if I'm just using synonyms for the hell of it. She gave us the history of the glacier, told us about the dike, and then talked to us about how this is the first year that out of country visitors are paying more for visits to national parks, and she's all for it. Which was disheartening, as I am distinctly NOT for that, and as she singled out Asian tourists for why this is such a great idea, I'm pretty sure her reasoning is xenophobic rather than equitable, as she claimed. I hadn't heard anything about this, which I stated, and said it didn't seem right, which Derek echoed, and then she told us that she had to get going, she was heading all the way out to Bradley Lake. Interesting conversation with a ranger that looked like Dr. Ruth, but older (which is dating me a lot). 

We were literally maybe an eighth of a mile from the lake when she left us, so we moved along and...as she had mentioned, the lake was absolutely stunning. It was still, it was quiet, it was beautiful. 

Derek set himself up to take actual camera photos, and I just wandered around, chatted a bit with some other hikers at the lake, and made a little squirrel friend. 

I wasn't fast enough on the draw to film her while she was getting her mushroom prize, but I did get several videos of her wandering around with it, and climbing up the tree to find somewhere to stash it. That was the best video I got, forever my favorite. 

Once Derek was done, we headed back to the car, laughed about a couple of young kids coming up the trail wearing VERY Osh Kosh Bagosh circa the 80s puffy jackets, and investigated the streams for more animal signs. We found a paw print and debated over whether it was a coyote print, or a wolf print. Derek told me that there weren't any wolves in Grand Teton, I told him he's an incorrect maniac, and 10 days later, we are still not settled on what the print is from. 

To fast forward JUST a bit to keep with the current paw mystery, our next stop was the visitor's center so I could get my Grand Teton Junior ranger badge, and they just so happened to have an area dedicated to animal prints, coats, scat, and preferred ecosystem. I took a picture of the coyote and the wolf, so we could compare and make an educated guess. 

coyote...

....or wolf?

The rest of the hike down was pretty uneventful, though we DID immerse ourselves in the strangeness of some of the lodgepole pines. We wondered if there was some sort of mass event that altered the shape of the younger growth and left the sturdier, older growth alone...

...or if there was some sort of pest that made the pines grow differently. Turns out it's neither of those things, lodgepole pines just grow like that. Their subsection is Pinus Contorta, it's legit in the name. Some of them are just interesting and crooked, and we learned a lot about pine trees when we got back to the car. 

(edit to add, I am having to chug 32 ounces of water right now so I can go get an ultrasound because I'm hoping to get my uterus removed...drinking water is disgusting when you're not actually thirsty. I hate this)

Circling back to our visit to the ranger station...and honestly, I should have just asked the ranger what the paw print was...I turned in my booklet and got my very first junior ranger badge. 

I had a little audience when I got sworn in by a park ranger, everybody clapped, and it took everything in me to not turn around and curtsy and bow. I was so excited to get my ranger badge, I was elated for the rest of the day. 

Next on our schedule was driving down to Jackson to go see the fish hatchery, which I actually enjoyed more than I thought I would. I initially just wanted to grab some photos for my dad, but learning about the conservation and the re-introduction of native fish whose populations are dwindling because colonizers are the worst was really interesting. 

I stuck my passport book into my purse just in case, and I was delighted to discover they had cancellation stamps at the hatchery. Derek had to go back up to grab his book, so I wandered around and waited for him, reading all of the info they had available on the walls, and hold on...

There's a junior ranger program here??? I looked around for someone to talk to...there was nobody available, but guess what was just out and about? Junior ranger badges. Just on the floor in an open bag. Right next to the junior ranger booklets. Did I want to steal one? Yup. 

Did I steal one? Nope. I looked through the booklet and it was all related to fishing, an activity I am very anti, so I decided that badge was not for me and I left the bag alone. I thought about yanking one for my dad, but also decided against that. 

Derek and I walked through the holding areas for the specific cutthroat troat they're working to preserve (I do have pictures of all of this, but I am eleven days home and so far behind in getting these up, so I'm just gonna be withholding), I took a few videos for my dad but they ended up being too long and wouldn't send (I need to get him and Caryn on Signal), all in all this was quite an enjoyable stop. 

The pond area outside was my favorite part:

Just brimming with cutthroats.

I am still surprised to have had such a solid time there, I really learned a lot about the fragility of the ecosystem and the rigid conservation efforts...enough that I felt internally hateful of the invasive variety of cutthroat troat we saw in RMNP and I was lowkey ready to cut a bitch. Bitch being all the fish that didn't belong there. Just to remind everyone, I am a vegetarian. More vegan than not, but I do go through phases where I want cheese or eggs, and I indulge those when they come around. 

We wanted pizza again, so we went back to Hand Fire, but we stopped first at the Museum of Wildlife Art. Derek and I were curious about if it would have a stamp for our book since it was the NATIONAL Museum, but no dice. No stamps. Just one funny sign in front of a statue:

We debated paying to walk through the gallery, but as much as I love art galleries, I was annoyed at this place for some reason I can't remember (I really need to get better about making time to do these day by day) and we left. I ordered our pizzas in the car, and I almost got a vegetarian pizza with goat cheese and arugula and pesto and cherries, but got almost the exact same vegan pizza from the day before, minus the butternut squash:

and Derek got the bison chili pizza which looked....underwhelming:

Underwhelming or otherwise, we both ate every morsel of our pizzas on the way back to the hatchet (no capital H for you!) to spend our last miserable night there before heading to Rocky Mountain National Park for the last leg of the trip. 

It is October 23rd. Home for 12 days. I am going to aim for finishing these up today, but I am clearly a very unreliable narrator, but in telling the truth to an audience and in reliably narrating on time.