Grand Teton National Park Trivia
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58 free Grand Teton National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Grand Teton National Park trivia quiz covers the 310,000-acre Wyoming park where the Teton Range shoots 7,000 feet straight up from the floor of Jackson Hole with no foothills in between. It ranges across the peaks and glaciers, the string of moraine lakes at the foot of the range, the Snake River and its native cutthroat trout, and the elk, moose, pronghorn, bears and wolves that make it one of the richest wildlife parks in the lower 48. The history questions dig into the fur trappers who named the Tetons, the disputed 1872 and 1898 first ascents, Calvin Coolidge's 1929 park, John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s covert land purchases and the bitterly opposed 1943 national monument, plus Mormon Row, Menor's Ferry, the Chapel of the Transfiguration, the film Shane, the Federal Reserve's summer retreat and the only commercial airport inside a US national park. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is marked on every question, so it works for a road-trip game or a hardcore park-nerd challenge. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our Yellowstone and US National Parks quizzes next.
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Q 01Grand Teton National Park is in the northwest corner of which US state?
Wyoming
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.
Q 02After Jackson, at the foot of the Tetons, elected an all-woman council in 1920, Pearl Williams took which job?
Town marshal
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.
Q 03On the old dude ranches of Jackson Hole, now inside Grand Teton National Park, who were the 'dudes'?
Paying city guests
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.
Q 04French-speaking trappers called the Teton Range's three great peaks les trois tétons, which translates as what?
The three breasts
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.
Q 05Which president signed the act creating Grand Teton National Park on February 26, 1929?
Calvin Coolidge
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.
Q 06Which president used the Antiquities Act to create Jackson Hole National Monument after John D. Rockefeller Jr. threatened to sell his land?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
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.
Q 07John D. Rockefeller Jr. secretly bought up Jackson Hole ranches through a front called what?
Snake River Land Company
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.
Q 08Which fur-trade partner of Jedediah Smith gave his name to the valley east of the Tetons?
Davey Jackson
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.
Q 09Which former Lewis and Clark expedition member is credited as the first white man to see the Tetons, in 1807-08?
John Colter
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.
Q 10The Tukudika, a Shoshone band who hunted high in the Tetons, took their name from which staple animal?
Bighorn
Bighorn sheep gave the Tukudika more than meat: they softened the rams' curled horns in hot water and shaped them into hunting bows.
Q 11After 1868, many Shoshone of the Teton and Yellowstone country were moved to which reservation?
Wind River
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.
Q 12The first proven ascent of Grand Teton came in August 1898, while the United States was at war with which country?
Spain
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.
Q 13Which Yellowstone superintendent claimed to have summited Grand Teton with James Stevenson in 1872, 26 years before Owen's party?
Nathaniel P. Langford
Q 21Which English-born trapper's Shoshone wife, Jenny, gave her name to one of Grand Teton National Park's best-known lakes?
Beaver Dick Leigh
Beaver Dick Leigh guided the 1872 government survey that named the lake for her; in 1876 smallpox killed Jenny and all their children.
Q 22Jenny Lake sits behind a terminal moraine pushed out by a glacier that flowed out of which canyon?
Cascade
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.
Q 23The two men shot by a posse at Cunningham Cabin, now in Grand Teton National Park, were accused of stealing what?
Horses
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.
Q 14Glenn Exum ran the Tetons' Exum Mountain Guides with which partner, who later founded the outdoor school NOLS?
Paul Petzoldt
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.
Q 15Which monolithic Teton peak, capped by a remnant of Flathead sandstone, towers over Jackson Lake?
Mount Moran
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.
Q 16The oldest rocks dated in the park, among the most ancient in any US national park, are roughly how old?
2.7 billion years
They are Archean gneiss and schist; the light granite of the central peaks intruded them about 2.5 billion years ago.
Q 17The Tetons have been rising for under 10 million years; which American range, by contrast, is over 300 million years old?
The Appalachians
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.
Q 18In 1971 Bill Briggs became the first person to descend Grand Teton by what means?
On skis
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.
Q 19Gymnast John Gill, who bouldered near Jenny Lake in the 1950s, is credited with bringing what to rock climbing?
Chalk for the hands
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.
Q 20Frank Banks, an engineer on Jackson Lake Dam, later supervised the building of which giant dam on the Columbia River?
Grand Coulee Dam
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.
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.
Q 24Which president flew into Grand Teton National Park's airport on a western tour in the 1960s?
John F. Kennedy
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.
Q 25Which Fed chairman's love of fly fishing helped bring the Fed's annual symposium to Jackson Hole in the early 1980s?
Paul Volcker
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.
Q 26Which regional Federal Reserve bank hosts the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium?
Kansas City
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.
Q 27The Craig Thomas Discovery and Visitor Center at Moose, opened in 2007, is named for a late what?
US senator
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.
Q 28Menor's Ferry carried wagons across the Snake with no engine; what pushed it across?
The river's current
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.
Q 29The 1925 log Chapel of the Transfiguration was sited so its altar window frames what?
The Cathedral Group
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.
Q 30Which family of homesteaders built the two much-photographed barns on Mormon Row?
Moulton
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.