Slide Lake and Phelps Lake
Aug 28, 2012I have good news! Yesterday when I headed out for a run, I could clearly see the Tetons. This hasn't happened in a while! The smoke is still clear today and everyone here is enjoying blue skies and mountain views again, as well as easier breathing!
In the past week or so, we have visited a couple of new areas that we hadn't been before. The first was Slide Lake over in the Gros Ventre. This is a large lake the was naturally created in 1925 when a land slide dammed the Gros Ventre River. You can still see the area above the lake where the landslide took place. The lake itself was very pretty. There were a ranch on the other side of it, as well as camping areas around and a boat launch. We walked around the edge of the lake for a while.
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| Slide Lake |
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| You can see the area where the ranch is on the left |
Slide Lake itself was beautiful (much prettier than the pictures show) but the best part of the trip was seeing the view of the Tetons on the way back. We were driving towards them head-on, giving us a much different view than we normally see from town or driving in the park. This was an amazing thing to see.
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| Tetons at sunset |
A few days later, we did a hike to and around Phelps lake, which is in the park. We drove there via Moose-Wilson Road, which had actually just reopened. It was closed for a few days because of bear activity! There was a mama grizzly with cubs that had ventured pretty close to Teton Village in search of food. Supposedly, the dry and hot summer has caused a lot of berries and other food sources to dry up and the bears are hungry. I think Phelps lake is pretty close to where a lot of the bear activity had been happening, but we didn't see any. The hike itself was pretty average in difficulty, not hard but not super flat, either. We did have a great view of Death Canyon along the way. There are tons of trails you can take from the trailhead, but we went in the afternoon and only really wanted to spend 2-3 hours hiking. Unfortunately, the smoke had not cleared as much at this point so the pictures are a little hazy.
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| Phelps Lake Overlook |
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| Phelps Lake with mountains in the distance |
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| View of Death Canyon |
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| Phelps Lake Jumping Rock |
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| There he goes! |
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| Phelps Lake from the beach |
So there are our 2 recent lake adventures! One of the incredible things about Jackson is that there are always new places to discover. I think I could live here for years without doing every hike and seeing every lake! The summer comes to an end pretty quickly here, but we are hoping to be able to continue hiking and discovering new places through September. You never know when the first snow could be! I am also really excited for October and our plans to explore the Pacific Northwest. I will definitely be sharing that through the blog!
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