Grand Teton National Park (American Safari part 1)

On Wednesday we took a tour of Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks with a guide which was arranged by the hotel. It was totally worth it since the guide was a naturalist and had tons of information about the park and its wildlife, and was a cool guy as well. We learned tons more than we would have otherwise.

This here is a pronghorn deer. An amateur mistake would be to call it an antelope, since the area is called antelope fields.


We saw a mother and her young, and the baby deer were really cute, like large rabbits. The deer can run about 60 mph sustained.

We saw tons of wildlife on the trip, hence the concept of the American Safari. Particularly impressive were the bison, which as you all know is a subset of the buffalo species. Here are some bison in beautiful surroundings.



I really like this picture because of the lighting and bison.


The mountains are pretty in this picture. Plus it contains a large bison. It is the very Platonic expression of the term 'eyeing warily.'


Here's the gratuitous beaver shot. You knew that was coming...

Okay, so it's only a beaver home, but I'm sure it has beavers in it.

This is Two Ocean lake which is fairly secluded and definitely not something you'd stumble across. It gets its name from the fact that two rivers flow out of it, one of which flows east down the Rockies towards the Mississippi and the other flows west into the Colorado River. So if you drop something into the lake you don't know which ocean it will end up in, which is a pretty wild concept.

We did not test it of course.

Here's a picture of a grizzly bear that we saw.


And here's a picture of the mob of people we saw it with.

A park ranger showed up to push people back. People get mauled by bears every year in the park. Our guide told us about a couple that tried to put their kid on a bear to take a picture of the kid riding it. It did not end well...

Here's a picture of a lake with the Grand Teton Mountains.


And here's our full color version of the famous Ansel Adams picture of the Tetons.

Maybe there is something to be said about using obsolete technology like black and white film...

One last point about the Teton Mountains. They're formed by the western tectonic plate going over the eastern one, so what you are really seeing here is the _side_ of the western plate. The western slopes of the mountains are far shallower, since that is the top of the plate. I find that concept incredible.