The next day starts with sunrise on the north shore of Yellowstone Lake. With Jane sleeping in, I take the car a mile west of the cabin and park roadside on an open stretch of shoreline with an eastward view. In the darkness, I set up my tripod and wait in the chilly lakeside air. The deep blue of the morning begins to lighten gradually. There is a low cloud cover that blots out most of the sky, and the distant Absarokas that I hoped to catch in timelapse are, unfortunately, mostly shrouded. But as the dawn comes over the range, waves of sunbeams begin to stream through the dissipating clouds, covering the shimmering glass of the lake surface with patterns of pastel pink, purple, and blue. One last, gorgeous sunrise beside Yellowstone Lake, and well worth the early morning.
Back at the cabin, Jane is just waking up. We collect our things (our once formidable food stores depleted to just a few juice bottles, trail mix, and the nasty huckleberry twists), load the car, and check out in the hotel's main lobby. We drive west around the north shore of the lake for the final time, heading south at the West Thumb road junction. At West Thumb, a semicircular blast crater formed in an eruption of the caldera 70,000 years ago, the lake flows into a bay whose edges are lined with geysers and hot springs. We walk the boardwalk around the geyser basin, filled with geothermal features like the Fishing Cone, a tiny geyser where fishermen would catch and boil their trout on the spot through the park's early years. In the morning fog, the basin is quite eerie, its startling blue hot springs seeming to stretch into infinity, while the water beside the shore terminates in a white curtain where one knows there ought to be an entire lake with distant horizons of pine forest. Near the car park, we run into a female elk grazing beside the boardwalk. She walks within a few feet of us before ambling off to the other side of the basin. We also see a snowshoe hare munching on grass in its summer outfit - a brown overcoat with comically oversized white boots.
A mile south, we make a stop at Grant Village, a collection of dormitories, cabins, and general stores hugging the shore of West Thumb. The general store has an impressive cafeteria by Yellowstone standards (hot food!), where the two of us chow down on buttermilk pancakes, scrambled eggs, and bacon. I go for another cup of fudge and peach ice cream (my last ice cream of the trip, I swear). Then we are southbound again, climbing over the lower edge of the caldera and past Lewis Lake. We leave Yellowstone at its southern entrance, where an impressive line of Memorial Day weekend traffic is waiting in the opposite direction.
We continue along the John D. Rockefeller Highway, named for the man whose land purchases in the early 20th century eventually led to the creation of Grand Teton National Park as we know it today. As we leave the mountainous Yellowstone plateau, the road descends sharply into Jackson Hole, a sunken valley between the Tetons to the west and the Gros Ventre Range to the east. Rounding the north end of Jackson Lake, the road turns ever so slightly to parallel the lake, and across the water, our sightline is cut by a massive wall of marine rocks crowned by a parapet of serrated peaks and hanging glaciers. One of the newest mountain ranges in North America, the Tetons rise abruptly, soaring 7000 feet up from the valley floor with no intervening foothills or graduated slopes. This incredible relief is an artifact of tectonic uplift along the western side of the Teton Fault (upon which the mountains sit) and corresponding depression along the eastern edge (creating Jackson Hole), as well as the young age of the mountains - too young to have been significantly sculpted and weathered by wind and water, like our gentle Appalachian range back home. The result is a signature mountain landscape that is as picturesque as any in the world - the purple mountain majesties of "America the Beautiful".
We stop at the Jackson Lake Lodge for a short climb up Lunch Tree Hill, a little rounded knoll behind the lodge that looks over willow flats, creek beds, Jackson Lake and Elk Island in the distance, and beyond them, the towering Cathedral Group at the heart of the Tetons. We walk back through the sagebrush and the cabin grounds beside the lodge, then spend some time browsing the hotel gift store and admiring its tall glass lobby windows facing to the west. Back in the car, we proceed south over the Snake River and to the southern shore of Jackson Lake; it is still too early to check into our lodgings at the Signal Mountain Lodge, so we continue a mile west to its namesake, a 1000-foot, pine-forested mound of glacial moraine and volcanic ash (from a Yellowstone super-eruption in distant geologic history). Conveniently, there is a vehicular access road that we ride to the west-facing secondary summit, and the east-facing main summit. To the east, there is a lovely expanse of green valleys and rivers curving toward the comparatively tame Gros Ventre and Wind River mountains of central Wyoming. To the west, even from a thousand feet above the valley, the spires of the Cathedral Group, punctuated by the massive spear-point of the Grand Teton itself, all but loom over us from ten miles' distance. We head back in the early afternoon and spend some time familiarizing ourselves with the amenities at the Signal Mountain Lodge - a gas station, convenience store, gift shop (where we purchase two on-sale fishing hats for future hikes), two restaurants, a marina with boat rentals, and finally, our cabin behind the lodge, a rustic (ugh) little log affair with a hotel room's heart of gold.
In the evening, after dinner at the Trappers Grill (onion rings, cheeseburger, and cornbread with chili; I resist the huckleberry crème brûlée being paraded across the dessert menu), we return to the top of Signal Mountain to watch the sun set over the Tetons. In a clearing on the side of the mountain, the atmosphere is nearly festive as we are joined by several hikers and other photographers. We trade selfies with a few other travelers, after which I find a small spot in the dirt to set up my tripod and aim it through the trees. It takes awhile for me to pick a composition, but I settle on a timelapse of Jackson Lake (rendered a winding waterway by the pine forests on Donoho Point and Elk Island) in the foreground, and lenticular clouds dancing over Mt. Moran in the background. With the second camera, I walk around the clearing, mostly shooting toward Teewinot and the Grand Teton, as purple and golden sunbeams glint off their snow-covered flanks. In the distance, a dark oval glides across the water near Marie Island, bound for the shores of Hermitage Point; we assume it is a kayak or canoe until we notice a set of antlers skimming above the surface. Then the sun sinks behind the mountain, and a shadow falls over the lake and woodlands. As we make our way down the mountain and back to the cabin on the shore, the distant snowfields and glaciers are glowing against the darkening sky, like nightlights mounted on the wall of a childhood bedroom.
