58 Fun Facts About Grand Teton National Park

Grand Teton National Park is in the northwest corner of which US state?

Wyoming. Local ranchers fought the park's growth so hard that the law which finally completed it also barred presidents from creating any new national monument in the state without Congress.

After Jackson, at the foot of the Tetons, elected an all-woman council in 1920, Pearl Williams took which job?

Town marshal. The whole women's ticket had won, one candidate beating her own husband, and the new council also named women as town clerk and treasurer.

On the old dude ranches of Jackson Hole, now inside Grand Teton National Park, who were the 'dudes'?

Paying city guests. Hard times helped start the trade: after the killing winter of 1886-87 cut deep into their herds, ranchers such as the Eaton brothers began charging the Easterners who came to taste cowboy life.

French-speaking trappers called the Teton Range's three great peaks les trois tétons, which translates as what?

The three breasts. An earlier party, which had steered by the same summits for days, named them the Pilot Knobs, but it was the trappers' earthier name, shortened to the Tetons, that lasted.

Which president signed the act creating Grand Teton National Park on February 26, 1929?

Calvin Coolidge. He signed in his last week in office; after pushback from the valley's ranchers, the new park took in only the Teton peaks and the lakes at their foot, not Jackson Hole itself.

Which president used the Antiquities Act to create Jackson Hole National Monument after John D. Rockefeller Jr. threatened to sell his land?

Franklin D. Roosevelt had to defend it too: when Congress voted in 1944 to abolish the monument, he killed the bill with a pocket veto.

John D. Rockefeller Jr. secretly bought up Jackson Hole ranches through a front called what?

Snake River Land Company kept the Rockefeller name out of every deal, because sellers who knew a millionaire was buying would have raised their prices.

Which fur-trade partner of Jedediah Smith gave his name to the valley east of the Tetons?

Davey Jackson ran his partners' trapping brigades in the region from 1826 until they sold out in 1830, and the story goes that William Sublette named the valley for him in 1829.

Which former Lewis and Clark expedition member is credited as the first white man to see the Tetons, in 1807-08?

John Colter left no surviving journal or map of the trek; the claim rests on William Clark's map and on a stone carved with his name and 1808, found in the early 1930s and never authenticated.

The Tukudika, a Shoshone band who hunted high in the Tetons, took their name from which staple animal?

Bighorn sheep gave the Tukudika more than meat: they softened the rams' curled horns in hot water and shaped them into hunting bows.

After 1868, many Shoshone of the Teton and Yellowstone country were moved to which reservation?

Wind River took many of them and Fort Hall others; in 1878 the Army also brought the Northern Arapaho, recent enemies of the Shoshone, to Wind River as a temporary step, and the two tribes share it still.

The first proven ascent of Grand Teton came in August 1898, while the United States was at war with which country?

Spain signed a ceasefire the very next day. The climb's leader, Franklin Spalding, later said he believed a disputed 1872 claim had beaten his own party to the top.

Which Yellowstone superintendent claimed to have summited Grand Teton with James Stevenson in 1872, 26 years before Owen's party?

Nathaniel P. Langford's claim fell under doubt because Owen's party found no cairn or other trace on top in 1898, and many climbers think he stopped on a lower spur.

Glenn Exum ran the Tetons' Exum Mountain Guides with which partner, who later founded the outdoor school NOLS?

Paul Petzoldt first climbed Grand Teton at 16, and in 1931 his young assistant soloed a new ridge while Petzoldt guided clients up the standard route; it is still called the Exum Ridge.

Which monolithic Teton peak, capped by a remnant of Flathead sandstone, towers over Jackson Lake?

Mount Moran's sandstone cap sits about 6,000 feet above the valley, while the same layer lies buried at least 20,000 feet under the valley floor: mountain and valley have moved that far apart.

The oldest rocks dated in the park, among the most ancient in any US national park, are roughly how old?

They are Archean gneiss and schist; the light granite of the central peaks intruded them about 2.5 billion years ago.

The Tetons have been rising for under 10 million years; which American range, by contrast, is over 300 million years old?

The Appalachians have had hundreds of millions of years to erode into lower ridges; erosion has had far less time to work on the Tetons, which is why they are still so jagged.

In 1971 Bill Briggs became the first person to descend Grand Teton by what means?

On skis, and at first nobody believed him: the next morning a local newspaper owner flew over the peak so that his tracks could be photographed as proof.

Gymnast John Gill, who bouldered near Jenny Lake in the 1950s, is credited with bringing what to rock climbing?

Chalk for the hands came straight from the gym: Gill treated boulders as gymnastics apparatus, and the dry-grip habit he started spread to climbers around the world.

Frank Banks, an engineer on Jackson Lake Dam, later supervised the building of which giant dam on the Columbia River?

Grand Coulee Dam made his name; on the Teton job his agency never cleared the shoreline forest, and the ring of drowned trees stayed an eyesore until crews removed it in the 1930s.

Which English-born trapper's Shoshone wife, Jenny, gave her name to one of Grand Teton National Park's best-known lakes?

Beaver Dick Leigh guided the 1872 government survey that named the lake for her; in 1876 smallpox killed Jenny and all their children.

Jenny Lake sits behind a terminal moraine pushed out by a glacier that flowed out of which canyon?

Cascade Canyon's glacier dropped its load of rock where the ice melted, and the longer its snout sat at the canyon mouth the higher the ridge grew, until it could hold back a lake.

The two men shot by a posse at Cunningham Cabin, now in Grand Teton National Park, were accused of stealing what?

Horses were the charge, and no court ever heard it: with the nearest sheriff far off in Evanston, a posse joined by local settlers surrounded the cabin and shot both men dead.

Which president flew into Grand Teton National Park's airport on a western tour in the 1960s?

John F. Kennedy came in September 1963 and told a Montana crowd the next day that he had flown over 'some of the most beautiful parts of the United States' that morning; he was killed in Dallas two months later.

Which Fed chairman's love of fly fishing helped bring the Fed's annual symposium to Jackson Hole in the early 1980s?

Paul Volcker was the draw: a conference that had moved from site to site since 1978 settled in the valley and became the late-August gathering that markets watch for hints on interest rates.

Which regional Federal Reserve bank hosts the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium?

Kansas City's bank looks after a Fed district that stretches from Missouri west across the plains to the Rockies, so the Tetons are on its home turf.

The Craig Thomas Discovery and Visitor Center at Moose, opened in 2007, is named for a late what?

US senator Craig Thomas, who chaired the Senate's national parks panel, had secured the federal share of the building's cost; he died in June 2007, two months before it was finished, and Congress named it for him.

Menor's Ferry carried wagons across the Snake with no engine; what pushed it across?

The river's current did the work: held on a cable with its pontoons angled toward the far bank, the ferry was pushed across by the Snake itself until a bridge replaced it in 1927.

The 1925 log Chapel of the Transfiguration was sited so its altar window frames what?

The Cathedral Group fills a plain picture window that stands in for stained glass; the Episcopal chapel went up in 1925 for the guests and hands of nearby dude ranches.

Which family of homesteaders built the two much-photographed barns on Mormon Row?

Moulton brothers John and T. A. raised them on neighbouring homesteads, and T. A. spent more than 30 years finishing his, the one photographers now line up for.

Mormon Row's first settlers reached Jackson Hole in the 1890s from which neighbouring state, rather than from Utah?

Idaho it was: the families clustered their 27 homesteads to share labour and dug irrigation ditches by hand to water them, a contrast with the valley's lone ranches.

The $46 million paid in 2016 to add the state-owned Antelope Flats parcel to Grand Teton National Park funded what?

Public schools get the proceeds because the square mile was state school-trust land, due to be auctioned for development if the park could not buy it; half the price came from private donors.

Which 1953 Western, shot near Kelly in Jackson Hole, has the Tetons looming behind its homestead sets?

Shane startled audiences with gunshots far louder than any Western before it: director George Stevens wanted viewers to feel what a bullet really did.

Hunters in Grand Teton National Park's fall elk hunt must hold a state licence and be deputized as what?

Rangers, on paper: the 1950 law that enlarged the park allows no hunting as such, only a 'controlled reduction of elk' by licensed hunters sworn in to carry it out.

Elk that summer in Grand Teton National Park spend the winter on which reserve at the edge of the town of Jackson?

National Elk Refuge was set up in 1912 after ranches and fences around the town of Jackson cut the herd off from its winter range and thousands of elk starved.

Which park resident is the fastest land mammal in the Western Hemisphere?

Pronghorn are far faster than any predator now living in North America; their speed is thought to be a leftover from outrunning the American cheetah, which died out long ago.

Of the five trout species in Grand Teton National Park's waters, which is the only native?

Cutthroat trout, named for the red slash under the jaw, were here first; the rainbow, brook, brown and lake trout were all stocked by the state or swam in from Yellowstone.

Which park bird is North America's largest waterfowl?

Trumpeter swans were shot for their skins and quills until, by the 1930s, only about 70 were known to survive in the lower 48 states, all of them in the Yellowstone region.

Which park bird is the smallest species in mainland North America?

Calliope hummingbird weighs about a tenth of an ounce, yet it survives cold summer nights high in the Rockies and some fly all the way to southern Mexico for the winter.

The only lizard in Grand Teton National Park, first confirmed in 1992, is named for which valley-floor shrub?

Sagebrush lizards went unrecorded in this heavily visited park until 1992; the cold keeps the reptile list to that lizard and three snakes, none of them venomous.

Bears of the Greater Yellowstone region feast each summer on which fat-rich insect that masses on high mountain slopes?

Army cutworm moths are among the fattiest foods a bear can find, richer than elk meat, and in places they supply as much as half of a bear's calories for the year.

The glaciers in Grand Teton National Park are only a few centuries old; they formed during which cold spell?

The Little Ice Age, from about 1400 to 1850, rebuilt small glaciers in the high cirques thousands of years after the great valley glaciers had melted away; they are shrinking again now.

Which Grand Teton waterfall is reached by a boat shuttle across Jenny Lake and a short hike?

Hidden Falls draws summer crowds because the shuttle cuts a five-mile round trip on foot to barely a mile; the park is otherwise not known for big waterfalls.

The Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve, opened in 2008, sits on the shore of which lake?

Phelps Lake fronted the JY Ranch, the valley's first dude ranch, which the Rockefellers kept as a private retreat for 75 years before handing over the last of it in 2007.

Which dude ranch still operates inside Grand Teton National Park as a Park Service concession?

Triangle X was sold to Rockefeller's buyers in the late 1920s, but the Turner family went on running it under lease, and it is now the only dude ranch run as a concession in the national park system.

A 1925 landslide that reshaped the land just east of Grand Teton National Park is named for which river?

Gros Ventre River was dammed by the slide, and when part of that natural dam gave way in May 1927 the flood wiped out the town of Kelly and killed six people.

Which photographer took the first pictures of the Teton Range while on an 1872 government survey?

William Henry Jackson was already famous: his photographs of Yellowstone the year before had helped persuade Congress to create the first national park.

Ansel Adams's 1942 photograph of the Tetons and the Snake River was sent into space aboard which NASA spacecraft?

Voyager 1 and 2 each carry the picture on a golden record of sights and sounds from Earth, launched in 1977, so the Tetons are among the few landscapes headed for interstellar space.

The Enclosure, a ring of stones high on Grand Teton, is thought to have been built by Native Americans for what?

Vision quests are the best guess: nobody recorded who built the ring, which an 1872 climbing party found already standing more than 13,000 feet up, proof that someone had been that high long before.

Roughly how big is Grand Teton National Park?

310,000 acres is more than three times the park of 1929, which took in only the peaks and the lakes at their foot; the valley floor was not added until 1950.

Olaus and Mardy Murie, whose ranch lies inside Grand Teton National Park, were leading campaigners for which conservation law?

The Wilderness Act of 1964 capped the couple's work: Olaus led the Wilderness Society from the ranch, which became a base camp for the campaign, and the law passed the year after his death.

Grand Teton National Park's high-country pines are weakened by which invasive fungal disease, leaving them prey to native beetles?

White pine blister rust is a fungus that reached North America only in the early 1900s; the whitebark pines it attacks depend on Clark's nutcracker, which buries their seeds and so plants the next generation.

Which 1985 film shot many of its snowbound outdoor scenes in and around Grand Teton National Park?

Rocky IV passed the Tetons off as the Soviet Union: the snowbound Russian retreat where Rocky trains for his fight with the Soviet champion was really Jackson Hole.

The Lower Saddle separates Grand Teton from which neighbouring peak?

Middle Teton stands across the saddle where most summit climbs begin; it and South Teton went unclimbed until 1923, when one party made the first ascent of both on the same August day.

Spencer's Mountain, a 1963 Henry Fonda film shot beneath the Tetons, told the family story that later became which TV series?

The Waltons set the story in Virginia's Blue Ridge; the film had moved the family west to a homestead beneath the Tetons.

The frozen surface of Jackson Lake is the only place in Grand Teton National Park where visitors may ride what?

Snowmobiles are allowed there for one purpose only, reaching ice-fishing spots, and only the quieter, cleaner models on the park's approved list may make the trip.

Which kind of animal was 399, the Grand Teton celebrity followed by photographers until her death in 2024?

A grizzly bear, she emerged from her den in 2020 with four cubs at once; a vehicle struck and killed her in October 2024, and the park's superintendent called her perhaps her species' most prominent ambassador.

The Tetons rise from the valley floor with no foothills because they are being lifted along what?

An active fault runs along the mountains' foot: each big earthquake heaves the range up and drops the valley floor, and the fault is still capable of a magnitude 7 shock.