Moira just liked the picture.
A nice distinctive feature of the Tetons is having a big flat open area to appreciate them from.
The Tetons themselves are formed from very old Precambrian gneiss, with a few granite plutons and many diabase dikes running through them. During the Paleozoic, these rocks were overlain by many thousands of feet of sedimentary rocks. Many cycles of deposition and erosion followed, but the next really interesting event (aside from the huge Yellowstone eruptions) was the emergence of the Teton fault about 9 million years ago.
The Teton fault runs north-south along the eastern foot of the currently-existing mountains. Rocks west of the fault pushed upwards, rocks east of the fault simultaneously dropped downwards. Volcanic ash, glacial deposits, and river sediment filled in the cavity that resulted from the downfaulting of the valley floor, filling it to the current depth and leaving it generally flat. The thousands of feet of sedimentary rock covering the rising mountains eroded away completely, except for a small cap of sandstone on Mt. Moran (the flattish peak to the right). The equivalent layer of sandstone is about 24,000 feet below the surface of Jackson Hole, implying a total movement along the fault of about 30,000 feet, at an average rate of displacement of 4 inches per hundred years.
The sediments of the valley floor tend to drain water very quickly, so relatively little water is available for surface plants. This results in grassy, generally open plains, with trees mostly occurring on the denser soils of old glacial moraines. (Or so I've read.)
So yes, we had a huge ice storm, and then lots of snow, and trees were broken, and the power went out, and thousands are still without power in subfreezing temperatures, but at least we get to take pictures like these.
We did not notice any hints of deer bladder, cow peritoneum, or ashed mouse skin, from which I gather the Farnese family isn't much into 'biodynamics'.
(Yes, you have to follow the link for this to make any sense.)
The members of the household eye each other; who would make the tastiest stew? Who?
UPDATE: And now it's snowing like crazy.
*Poof.*
(Previously addressed here.)
UPDATE: The New York Daily News sums it up: 'Vilsack (who?) is out'
And The Nation manages to find the dark hand of Conspiracy! at work.
The Tetons are nothing if not craggy – unusually so, really – for the Rocky Mountains. The disconnect between the peaks' name and cold, stony reality was noted back in 1905:
I think that the man who gave them this name must have seen them from a great distance; for as we approach them, the graceful curvilinear lines which obtained for them this delicate appellation appear angular and ragged. From our present point of view the name seems a misnomer. If there were twelve of them instead of three, they might better be called the "Titans," to illustrate their relation to the surrounding country. He indeed must have been of a most susceptible nature, and, I would fain believe, long a dweller amid these solitudes, who could trace in these cold and barren peaks any resemblance to the gentle bosom of woman.
I first saw the Tetons in my mid-teens, and though I'd lived in the mountain West by then, I was unprepared for their cragginess and in your face! base-to-peak rise of about 7000 feet – it was the first time I can remember being truly awestruck by something. They were so high, and right there – foothills be damned. perhaps I'm just easier to impress than some (or most).
One thing I like about the highest peaks of the Tetons as subjects for photographs is the way they change shape as you travel up the length of Jackson Hole. Near the southern end, you get the more standard view, but as you travel northwards the peaks become more tightly grouped, and more precipitous.
These three peaks (Teewinot, Grand Teton, Mt. Owens) are the same as in the top image, but have quite a different character when seen from the north.
As afternoon wore on, clouds and haze started to reduce the quality of the view. We drove on; we needed to get to Mammoth Hot Springs before stopping, and I didn't want a repeat of the Sequoia experience.
[1] "The Discovery of Yellowstone Park: Journal of the Washburn Expedition to the Yellowstone and Firehole Rivers in the Year 1870", 1905.
Contemplating the route back, we were tired. Tired of the trip, the car, the driving; we cut one day out of the return, forsaking Devils Tower and the Black Hills. We had been driving so long that the car needed an oil change; a mechanic at the local Oil-O-Change-O franchise uttered dire warnings that our accessory belt was crack'd and burnt; but the trusty Saturn dealer looked at it, laughed, and said it would get us home.
We and I-84 followed the Columbia upstream, under a high smoky haze. We drove eastward, over the Blues and down into the Snake River Plain, and ended the day at a generic motel in a little town outside of Twin Falls. The only interesting thing about the town – a surprising number of Carnicerias and Botanicas. In rural Idaho?
The next morning, it appeared we had outrun the smoke and haze that had been dogging us for most of the past week, and we continued following the Snake upstream. Eventually, we left the plain and started the climb towards Jackson Hole, passing through beautiful aspen and conifer forests, watching rafters on the Snake heading the opposite direction. We arrived at Jackson (crowded!) looking for a quick lunch. We ended up in a small shop, getting sandwiches and drinks from a multiply-pierced girl behind a counter. Tea? Some sort of herbal monstrosity. No thanks, just water.
Eating, I noticed some interesting literature on the wall, concerning an organization that tried to enable the working people of Jackson – the schoolteachers, shop workers, etc. – to actually buy homes and live in Jackson, a town suffering from severe Portlandization. My reading was disrupted by a thin middle-aged man, dressed like a teenaged ski bum, embarking on a loud cellphone conversation, the crux of which was all about his going to Burning Man next week, and how wild that would be, etc. His monologue drowned out all other conversation until he left the shop. I watched him cross the street, and drive off in a Jeep Cherokee (I was hoping for a big Range Rover or similar).
Fed, we drove north into the sagebrushy flats of Jackson Hole on what would prove to be the last truly clear day of the whole trip. Soon, the Tetons came into view.
You can always tell when it's really cold; when the birds hunch down so that their feathers cover their feet when they perch. This is a cedar waxwing huddled in a backyard tree, one of a small flock that comes through periodically to eat frozen berries off another tree in the backyard. Birds rarely eat the berries in the fall, when they ripen; they almost always wait for the dead of winter to start pulling the frozen, shrivelled fruit, sort of like berry jerky, off the tree. (I guess this counts as "dead of winter", right? It's about equidistant between the solstice and the equinox.)
The picture's fairly low quality because the bird didn't take up much of the field of view, and I couldn't shrink it much from the raw pixellage.
In a vain quest to come up with some unbearably precious and esoteric tidbit to throw in with this picture from yesterday morning (when the temperature hovered around -1°F, as it's been doing all week), I cudgelled my brain to come up with a clever pastiche of the opening of Pale Fire, but I just couldn't come up with a good set of rhymes. I turned to an internet rhyming dictionary and came up with:
I was the shadow of the waxwing cold...but I think it needs more work.
better frozen berries than a dead slime mold
Since others have already gotten the bandwagon rolling, I'll just pile on and remark that it's damned cold here as well (officially -13° F., although our own outdoor thermometer says -5° F.).
Time for hunkering down and breaking out the whale blubber.
