Jackson Hole Underground

I’ve added a link to the new Jenny Lake climbing ranger site, where mountaineers can get updates on popular climbing and hiking routes in the Tetons. There’s also a lot of information about backcountry camping in the park. (Alas, no permits online.)

DG at The Snaz has the scoop.

Hard to believe we’re a week past the Fourth of July, and still so much snow in the mountains. Won’t be long before it begins piling up again.

I’m holding onto summer as long as I can.

(Updated 6/27 with photos from the actual river trip, shot by passenger Paul Schnell)

I was back on the river yesterday, after a week’s layoff due to foul weather. The flow in Grand Teton National Park is surging, with the sudden arrival of sunshine finally triggering a melt-off in the high country.

Earlier I wrote about the experience of exploring the river in the park, and that’s the way spring has been: abundant wildlife, elk sightings nearly every trip, the uncertainty around each bend of not knowing just what you’ll encounter.

Last night, on the last of my three trips, I rowed into a small side channel. It’s quiet, and a good place to see wildlife up close, when animals happen to be there.

Within minutes I had spotted what looked like a large dirt clump on the side of the river. It was too large to be a beaver, but it wasn’t moving. We floated closer. A tourist asked me a question, and the brown shape slowly roused, turned around and looked at us with sad eyes.

“It’s a grizzly bear,” I said, and the tourists screamed.

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As town gears up for the Jackson Hole Film Festival, tonight there will be a showing of an off-festival movie that revs the debate over snowmobiles into a full-throttle indictment of the Bush-Cheney administration’s approach to government.

“A Snowmobile for George” is the story of California filmmaker Todd Darling’s ride into the exhaust cloud of deregulation. Following his own curiosity after buying a sled, Darling races from the controversy over allowing snowmobiles in Yellowstone to runaway coal-bed methane drilling in the Powder River Basin to a hideous die-off of salmon on the Klamath River.

The 96-minute film will screen at 6:30 p.m. at the Jackson campus of Teton Science Schools, off Highway 22. The event is being sponsored by the Western Organization of Research Councils, an association that represents ranchers and other landowners on issues of water, air and soil quality. On hand will be George Smith, a cowboy poet from Sheridan.

I have returned to river guiding on my first and favorite stretch of the Snake in Grand Teton National Park. There are many reasons for this, chief among them a desire to spend more time outside and less staring at a computer, while getting paid for it.

Late last week, a call came over the radio from two guides in front that I should hug a certain bank a few miles downstream of Deadman’s Bar. There was a carcass I might want to have a look at, the guides said.

So I rowed my boat, slowly rounding a curve. I stood on the oar frame to get a better look, and as ten expectant tourists arched their necks, we came in sight of … a dead wolf.

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(Click to enlarge this largeness.)

It’s mid-May, and yet he’s peculiarly enthusiastic about skiing. At a time when most of us are looking ahead to boating and biking, he wouldn’t dream of stowing away the skis. In fact, he never stows away the skis.

He’s Ed Bushnell, journalist, videographer and adventurer turned law scholar. And he’s in Jackson this week to keep alive his streak of skiing every month of the year.

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