Grand Teton & a Beaver

06/09 / Thursday / Grand Teton National Park

I wake up at 06:15 am from the sunshine! Sun! Unbelievable! We get up at 8:00 am - everything is all closed up. Shit. One hour later, we bravely sit in the car and find a café in Jackson Hole, about 15 minutes away. We stay there until 11:00 am because it's not just raining anymore, it's also snowing. We chat with the owner of the coffee shop, who is from Slovakia and speaks perfect German with us. But then we want to go on the hunt and head to the Grand Teton National Park. There is a road that runs quite close to the mountains and is not accessible for RVs and trailers and partially not paved.

We see hundreds of Elk deer in the broccoli-covered plains. The vegetation (called Sagebrush in English) is called desert mugwort in German.

Elk in Grand Teton

The view of the mountains is zero, we can only imagine the peaks or the mountains themselves, the windshield wipers are running and the car's heater is on. At the Jenny Lake, there is a small blue hole in the sky, but there is no view over the lake that matches what we have seen in books. We have 36°F (2°C).

We see Rocky Mountain Mule Deer again, which have a black tail tip, but otherwise have the typically large ears of Mule Deers that we have already seen in Canada. In a water puddle, a beaver is diligently doing its thing and is not bothered by us at all, while it nibbles on branches and paddles around.

There are chickens crossing the road in front of us, which are supposedly called sage grouse, but I don't know what Beifußhuhn is in English. Well, the animals are not in a hurry and walk boringly across the road. They have wings, but maybe they have not discovered them yet... Of course, there are hundreds of Elk deer everywhere, which can be easily spotted by their white butts. We are amazed by the pelicans that also live here. They are American white pelicans, a species that migrates to the south as migratory birds in the winter, but lives in the freshwater lakes and rivers of the mountains in the summer and does not dive for fish like their counterparts in Florida, but forage like ducks.

There are so many interesting things. We see some beautiful birds on a parking lot that are about the size of blackbirds. They are Yellowheaded Blackbirds.

The last hour of our trip it rains again, it blows strongly and it has become dark. The sunset is around 9:00 pm.

We eat the leftovers from yesterday and have some soup and start a laundry machine.