The Road to Colter Bay

In the mid afternoon we finally entered Grand Teton National Park.  As I previously mentioned there was no entrance station.  I can only assume this is because the vast majority of people drive into the Tetons from Yellowstone (from the north) and it isn't worth it to staff an entrance station at the northern part of the park.

We didn't stop at the "entrance" for longer than it took me to take this picture.  I knew that we still had quite a bit of ground to cover, and only so many hours of daylight in which to do it.  Our first destination in the park was the Colter Bay Visitor Center, but we did stop briefly before that to take some cloud-obscured pictures of the Teton Range.

How could I resist the chance to post another picture of my beautiful wife?

Inside the center there was an Indian Arts Gallery with quite a few interesting artifacts.

I really enjoyed the components that included things you could touch (see the entire lower panel above).

Intricate beadwork is also very fascinating and beautiful to look at.

But I did find myself taking a picture of a mistake on a sign, I simply couldn't help it, ;-).  If you're curious the covered up word is "used".

Looking at a map I discovered that the Tetons also has a lake that may straddle the Continental Divide (at least I assume that is where the name came from).

After leaving the visitor center we continued southward towards Jenny Lake.  But before long we came across a traffic jam.

I noticed that there were a few rangers out and they weren't shooing people along, merely keeping them to one side of the road, so I got out of the car and climbed up the hill to join the crowd.  I was quite glad that I had for when I looked across the road I spotted some bears!

I tried to take video but couldn't manage to get my camera working before they disappeared into the undergrowth.  After we started up the car there was another brief traffic jam as the bears crossed the road and the rangers kept everyone away.

~Matt