Travel to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks – Amateur Traveler Episode 183 Transcript

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Travel to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks – Episode 183 Transcript

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Erik: It is so easy to overlook Grand Teton because Yellowstone is so incredibly diverse. But if you’re going to Yellowstone, the Grand Teton is just to the south via a short drive on the John D. Rockefeller Memorial Parkway. Which I must say sounds fancy, people conjure up images in their mind, and it’s pretty benign. It’s just a road that connects the two parks. The Rockefeller Parkway showed me was how thoroughly a forest fire can damage a landscape. Because when you drive the Rockefeller Parkway, you’ll see remnants of the forest fires, not just the large one in ’88 but also some of the ones that happened in the last decade. But you pass through that and then you get into Grand Teton National Park which I’ve seen a lot of mountains and these are some of the most fetching mountains you will ever see. Every where you go in the park they are visible to you and you may have seen them a hundred times already in one day, but you’ll still find yourself pulling over at that wayside to get out and look at this magnificent wall of mountains that just lies right over the Snake River. They are just really attractive.

Chris: And it’s odd that you use the term fetching. As the origin of the Grand Teton, I’m not sure if you know that story?

Erik: I know the story but I wanted to keep your clean label on the iTunes broadcast part. It was French travelers across the mountains who obviously hadn’t seen women in a while and named them after a part of the female anatomy that I guess they had longed for after all their many months in the wilderness. Another great description of that comes from the same Bill Bryson book I just mentioned where he describes the desperation of French travelers. You look at them and that’s not what I think of but that’s where the name comes from.

Chris: No, well in fact they’re named after the French word for breast, which is particularly odd considering that there are three predominate peaks. So it had been, as you say, a long time in the wilderness.

Erik: Yes. It’s a great story though. It’s one of those where, yeah you got to figure out if you’re kids are really old enough to handle that story. Because I did look very carefully when I was in visitor centers. The National Park Service can be very politically correct and I wanted to see how they were going to exactly approach that particular story and I couldn’t find any mention of it there. Fortunately I wasn’t having to travel with any teens or pre-teens so I didn’t have to explain that story to and then every time you get out of the car and have to listen to them giggle at that story.

Chris: Sure.

Erik: There are a couple of things about the Grand Teton I’ll mention real quick here. I worried about it when taking notes. I did a page and a half of notes on Yellowstone and have five sentences on Grand Teton. I think that’s probably what you get a lot of with Grand Teton. Everybody hears Yellowstone and is overwhelmed by the size of that park. But there’s good stuff in Grand Teton too. There are two historic sites that I like a lot. One is Menors Ferry, which is down on the south side of the park near the Moose Visitors Center. This was a turn of the century ferry across the Snake River. They have a restored trading post there and a restored church; or replica of those, not exactly restored. And then also The Cunningham Cabin, which is very basic but gives you an idea of what the early settlers in the area had to go through in settling the area.

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