At the start of the tour
Welcome to Grand Teton scenic loop
Welcome to Grand Teton National Park. This tour follows the loop the park itself suggests for seeing the valley by car. First, north through the open sagebrush of the valley: the barns of Mormon Row, the Snake River view Ansel Adams made famous, a homesteader's cabin and Oxbow Bend. Then back south along the Teton Park Road, at the foot of the mountains: Jackson Lake Dam, Mount Moran, the Cathedral Group and Jenny Lake, ending at a small log chapel by the river, close to where we begin.
The Teton Range rises more than seven thousand feet above this valley, to nearly thirteen thousand eight hundred feet at the summit of the Grand Teton. Its rocks are among the oldest in North America, yet the mountains themselves are among the youngest on the continent. They've been rising for less than ten million years, one earthquake at a time, and erosion hasn't had long to wear them down. That's why they look so sharp.
Fur trappers called a valley ringed by mountains a hole. This one was Davey Jackson's Hole, after the trapper David Jackson, later shortened to Jackson Hole.
I'll tell you each stop's story on the way there, and what you're looking at once you arrive. Keep an eye on the sagebrush as we go, because bison, pronghorn, elk and moose all live in this valley.
Point 1 · At the stop
Craig Thomas Discovery and Visitor Center
This is the Craig Thomas Discovery and Visitor Center in Moose, with the Teton Range rising above it. It's open daily from spring through late fall, and it's worth a look inside. The exhibits are built around this place, its people, preservation, mountaineering and the Indigenous tribes of the valley. There's a collection of Indigenous artifacts, a raised relief map that gives you a bird's-eye view of the whole park, and the names of peaks set into the floor, so you can stand on a name and look out at that mountain. Rangers lead programs here, and there's a film about the park.
Now look at the highest peaks in the middle of the range: the Grand Teton, the Middle Teton and Mount Owen. They're made of granite, a hard, speckled rock that formed about two and a half billion years ago, when molten magma squeezed into cracks in even older rock and cooled. Granite is harder than the rock around it, and that's why those three stand highest.
Ancient rock and young mountains: keep that pair in mind today, because the whole park is built on it.
History, on the way there
On the way: Mormon Row
Next, we're heading to Mormon Row, a line of old homesteads out on the flats east of Blacktail Butte.
The Homestead Act of 1862 promised a hundred and sixty acres to anyone willing to build a house and farm the land for five years. Jackson Hole was one of the last places in the West to be settled that way. Homesteaders didn't arrive here until 1884, and the land was hard: sandy, rocky soil, long cold winters and dry summers.
In the 1890s, Mormon families came over from Idaho and settled on these flats. Healthy sagebrush told them the soil was richer than most, Blacktail Butte sheltered them from the wind, and the Gros Ventre River was close. Unlike most homesteaders in the West, who lived far apart, they clustered their farms to share the work. The Post Office named their community Grovont. They built homes, a church and a school, and twenty-seven homesteads in all.
To grow anything, they needed water. Between 1896 and 1937 they dug irrigation ditches by hand and with teams of horses, a whole network of levees and dikes carrying water from central ditches out to the fields, and water still flows in some of those ditches today.
Point 2 · At the stop
Mormon Row
This is Mormon Row. The barn everyone photographs is T. A. Moulton's, close by, with the Teton Range behind it. The sunrise view of that barn is one of the most photographed scenes in the valley. T. A. and his brother John homesteaded here in 1908, and T. A. took more than thirty years to build his barn, a gable roof with sheds along its sides.
North of Antelope Flats Road, John's homestead has a pink stucco house and a tall, two-story barn with a gambrel roof, the kind with a double slope.
Also on the row is the Andy Chambers homestead, the most complete group of old buildings left here. Andy claimed his land in 1912. His family had no running water until 1927, and in 1946 they made their own electricity with a windmill. That windmill is still standing. Power lines didn't reach Mormon Row until the 1950s.
By then, many families had already sold. In 1930, the Snake River Land Company met with the settlers here, and many sold their land, most of them keeping lifetime leases. So look at the flats now: sagebrush, with bison and pronghorn, where there were hayfields and grazing cattle. These barns are what's left of a whole community that farmed a place that never made farming easy.
History, on the way there
On the way: Snake River Overlook
Next, we're heading to Snake River Overlook, the most famous view in the park, thanks to one photograph.
In 1941, the National Park Service commissioned the photographer Ansel Adams to make a photo mural for the Department of the Interior building in Washington. The theme was nature as it's protected in the national parks. Over 1941 and 1942 he photographed parks from the Grand Canyon to Glacier, and Grand Teton was one of them. Then the war came. The mural project was halted and never resumed.
The photographs survived. The National Archives holds two hundred twenty-six prints from that project, most of them signed and captioned by Adams himself. One of the Grand Teton prints carries a plain caption: The Tetons, Snake River. It's the view you've probably seen: the sweep of the river below the sagebrush flats, and the high peaks towering above it.
He made it from roughly the place we're heading to. A wartime project that never happened left the country one of its best-known pictures of a national park.
Point 3 · At the stop
Snake River Overlook
This is Snake River Overlook. The Snake River sweeps below the sagebrush flats, and the high peaks of the Teton Range tower above it all. Ansel Adams stood roughly here. If your picture doesn't quite match his, don't worry: trees have grown since then, and nobody knows his exact spot.
The river has gone by a lot of names. One was the Lewis River, after Lewis and Clark. French fur trappers called it the accursed mad river, and others shortened that to the Mad River. An older name tied to the Shoshone people led, in the end, to the one that stuck: the Snake.
It begins in the Teton Wilderness, just outside Yellowstone, flows briefly through Yellowstone, cuts through this park, crosses Idaho and joins the Columbia River in Washington. On summer days, watch for rafts below. Boaters put in upstream and float down past Deadmans Bar, some of them all the way to Moose.
History, on the way there
On the way: Cunningham Cabin
Next, we're heading to Cunningham Cabin, the oldest cabin in Jackson Hole.
J. Pierce Cunningham started a cattle ranch here in the 1880s, the Bar Flying U. He and his wife, Margaret, chose this ground for a reason. An ancient glacier had left silt here, and that silt made a soil that held moisture and fed lush grasses and wildflowers, far better than the rocky flats elsewhere in the valley.
Even so, ranching here was hard. Winters were long, and around 1920 an agricultural depression swept the country. Add a growing conservation movement, and by 1928 the Cunninghams were ready to let go. They sold their land to the Snake River Land Company and retired to Victor, Idaho.
That land company was quietly buying up a great deal of this valley, and at first almost nobody knew who was really behind it.
Point 4 · At the stop
Cunningham Cabin
This is Cunningham Cabin. From the lot, an easy loop of about eight tenths of a mile takes you to the cabin and back.
Look at its shape. It's a dogtrot cabin, a style that was common in the eastern states: two small cabins joined by an open, covered breezeway. Many of the valley's first cabins and homesteads are gone. This one is still standing, and it's some of the best evidence left of what pioneer life looked like here, years before there was a park.
While you're out, watch the meadows around it. Badgers and coyotes hunt here. Then look up at the mountains, and imagine running cattle under them through a Jackson Hole winter, trying to make a living and simply to survive.
History, on the way there
On the way: Oxbow Bend
Next, we're heading to Oxbow Bend, one of the most celebrated views in the park.
The name comes from the way rivers wander. On level ground, a river swings into loops called meanders. When a meander gets cut off from the main stream and left behind as a pond, geologists call it an oxbow. At Oxbow Bend, a meander of the Snake River curves toward the turnout, slow and wide.
Slow water makes rich habitat. Moose, beavers, river otters, ospreys and American white pelicans all come to this bend, and the park says the bend offers both scenery and wildlife all year round. Behind it all stands Mount Moran, which makes this one of the classic photographs in the park.
Point 5 · At the stop
Oxbow Bend
This is Oxbow Bend. A channel of the Snake River bends toward the turnout, and on a still day the water often holds a reflection of Mount Moran, the broad peak that dominates the northern end of the range. Of all the views of the Tetons in this park, this is one of the most iconic.
The slow water and the willows along it are what bring the animals. Look for moose feeding in the shallows, beavers and river otters working the channels, and ospreys hunting for fish. Trumpeter swans and American white pelicans turn up on the water. Bears are seen here now and then, too. If one appears, the park asks you to stay at least a hundred yards away, and at least twenty-five yards from all other wildlife.
Animals keep their own schedule. Give it a few quiet minutes, scan the edges of the water, and see what the bend gives you today.
History, on the way there
On the way: Jackson Lake Dam
Next, we're heading to Jackson Lake Dam.
Jackson Lake is a natural lake, up to four hundred feet deep, carved by an immense glacier that once flowed off the Yellowstone Plateau. But for more than a century there's been a dam on top of it.
The first was a log crib dam, built in 1906 and 1907. It failed in 1910. In 1916, the Bureau of Reclamation completed a new dam that raised the lake by thirty-nine feet. The rising water flooded the forest along the old shoreline and drowned many trees. During the Great Depression, young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps helped clear the shores of Jackson Lake and burned the slash piles.
There's one more chapter. The Teton fault, which runs along the base of the range, is capable of a magnitude seven to seven and a half earthquake. In the 1980s, engineers drained the reservoir and reinforced the dam to withstand a magnitude seven and a half.
Point 6 · At the stop
Jackson Lake Dam
This is Jackson Lake Dam, with Jackson Lake spread out above it and Mount Moran across the water.
The level of the lake is never fixed. It changes with the winter's snowpack, with the demand for water downstream, and with work on the dam itself. In 2026, the park photographed the lake brimming at the Mud Flats turnout in July, and by September the water had pulled right back from it.
Below the dam, the Snake River runs on through the valley, and this is the main starting point for floating the river in the park. People fish below the dam, too.
So this is a lake that's partly natural and partly made. In that way it's a fair picture of the whole valley: wild, and worked, at the same time.
History, on the way there
On the way: Mount Moran Turnout
Next, we're heading to the Mount Moran Turnout.
The mountain is named for Thomas Moran, a landscape painter who traveled with the Hayden expedition into Yellowstone in 1872. His sketches and watercolors helped introduce this whole Greater Yellowstone region to people back East. Moran visited the west side of the Teton Range, but he never saw the mountain that carries his name.
It's a fitting mountain for a painter, because it tells the whole geologic story of the range in a single face: ancient igneous and metamorphic rock at its core, sedimentary rock draped over its summit, and glaciers clinging to its slopes.
Point 7 · At the stop
Mount Moran Turnout
This is the Mount Moran Turnout, facing the dominant peak of the northern Teton Range.
Start with the dark vertical stripe across the east face. It looks almost man-made. It's a dike of black diabase: molten rock that squeezed into a crack in the older bedrock hundreds of millions of years ago and cooled. Later, erosion stripped away the rock around it, and the dike stands out. It's about a hundred and fifty feet wide. If the exposed part were melted down, the magma would fill Jenny Lake three times over.
Now look at the very top. The summit wears a small cap of Flathead Sandstone, laid down as beach sand when an ancient sea rose. Up there, it's about six thousand feet above the valley. On the other side of the Teton fault, that same layer lies buried roughly twenty thousand feet below the valley floor. That difference is the work of the fault.
Then look along the flanks for ice. Falling Ice Glacier can be seen from this turnout. Mount Moran carries several glaciers, and like every glacier in this park, they have all retreated since the late eighteen hundreds.
History, on the way there
On the way: Cathedral Group Turnout
Next, we're heading to the Cathedral Group Turnout on the Jenny Lake scenic loop. It's the best place in the park to see the fault that built these mountains.
The Teton fault is a crack in the earth's crust about forty miles long, running north and south along the base of the range. This whole region is slowly being stretched east to west. Stress builds along the fault until it breaks in an earthquake, and each time the mountain block lifts and the valley floor drops. On average, the fault moves about ten feet in each earthquake: two to three feet up, and four to six feet down.
That's how the Tetons rise, one earthquake at a time. In the ten million years since the fault began moving, the total offset is probably more than twenty-five thousand feet. And it isn't finished. The fault is still active. Geologists have dated its three most recent earthquakes to about fifty-nine hundred, eight thousand and ten thousand years ago.
Point 8 · At the stop
Cathedral Group Turnout
This is the Cathedral Group Turnout. The three great spires here are Teewinot Mountain, the Grand Teton and Mount Owen. Seen from the northeast, as they are from this loop, they rise like the towers of a cathedral, which is how the group got its name. Cascade Canyon opens below them.
Now look lower, to the west, at the base of Rockchuck Peak. Look for a break in the slope: a steeper step cutting through the gentler slopes of glacial debris along the mountain front. That's the fault scarp, the Teton fault showing at the surface. It records up to a dozen earthquakes since the glacial ice melted out of this valley, about twenty thousand years ago.
So this one view holds both halves of the story: the beauty of the peaks, and the power that keeps lifting them. Each of those earthquakes raised the mountains a little higher above the valley.
History, on the way there
On the way: Jenny Lake Overlook
Next, we're heading to Jenny Lake Overlook. The lake is named for a woman, and the lake beside it for her husband.
Richard Leigh, known as Beaver Dick, was a British-born fur trapper. In 1863 he arrived in Teton Valley, on the Idaho side of the range, with his Shoshone wife, Jenny. In 1872 the two of them helped the Hayden survey as it mapped and explored this valley: he as its guide, she with the camp. The survey named Jenny Lake and Leigh Lake in their honor, breaking with the custom of naming landmarks after members of the expedition.
Four years later, in 1876, Jenny and their six children died of smallpox. Afterward, Beaver Dick wrote to a friend: I am all alone, and I keep doing at something from daylight to dark every day. I am very lonesome.
The lake below the mountains has carried Jenny's name ever since that survey named it in 1872.
Point 9 · At the stop
Jenny Lake Overlook
This is Jenny Lake Overlook, above the most popular destination in the park. Look across the water to the opening in the mountains. That's Cascade Canyon.
Notice its shape: a broad U, not the narrow V that a river cuts. Ice Age glaciers flowed down that canyon, widened it, and gouged out the basin this lake now fills. Where the ice dropped its load of rock and gravel, it left a ridge called a moraine, which rings the lake and holds the water in. The conifers around the shore grow on that moraine, because its fine soil holds moisture the sagebrush flats can't.
All kinds of people have come to this shore: American Indians, fur trappers, survey expeditions, dude ranchers, car campers and climbers. Every one of them stood somewhere near here and looked up that same canyon.
History, on the way there
On the way: South Jenny Lake
Next, we're heading to South Jenny Lake, the busiest corner of the park.
It could have looked very different. In 1919 there were proposals to dam the outlet of Jenny Lake, and of Emma Matilda and Two Ocean lakes as well. That alarmed local businessmen and ranchers enough that some began to think the National Park Service might be their only protection from commercial development. A few years later, John D. Rockefeller Jr. toured the valley and saw shabby developments along the south and east shores of this lake. When Congress finally created the first, much smaller Grand Teton National Park in 1929, it protected the Teton Range and six glacial lakes at the foot of the peaks.
One building from those early days is still here. In the late 1920s, Harrison Crandall built a photography studio at Jenny Lake. He sold photographs and postcards of the Teton Range, and served as the park's official photographer, and his studio is now the Jenny Lake Visitor Center.
Point 10 · At the stop
South Jenny Lake
This is South Jenny Lake. The visitor center here is the old Crandall Studio, now an art gallery and museum about the part that artists have played in protecting the Teton Range. It's open daily from late spring to mid-fall.
From the shore, a boat shuttle crosses the lake in summer, for a fee, for easier access to Hidden Falls and Inspiration Point. The trail around the lake starts here too.
The Jenny Lake Ranger Station, where climbers get advice and backcountry permits, has its own history. It's the old cabin of Lee Manges, who homesteaded beside the road at Windy Point, on the hill above Moose, under the central peaks. The cabin now serves the people heading up into those same mountains.
History, on the way there
On the way: Teton Glacier Turnout
Next, we're heading to the Teton Glacier Turnout, facing the Grand Teton itself.
Nobody knows who first climbed the Grand. American Indians explored the range and climbed many of its peaks before Europeans arrived. Members of the 1872 Hayden survey claimed to have reached the summit, but the first documented ascent came in 1898, by William Owen, Franklin Spalding, John Shive and Frank Peterson.
In 1931, two climbers, Paul Petzoldt and Glen Exum, started the first guide service on these mountains. Today more than ninety routes and variations lead to the top of the Grand Teton, and nearly every peak in the range draws climbers with the skills to reach its summit. The park even keeps a collection of old summit registers, the notes that early climbers left on top of the peaks to prove they'd been there.
Point 11 · At the stop
Teton Glacier Turnout
This is the Teton Glacier Turnout. Look high on the northeast flank of the Grand Teton for ice tucked into the shadows. That's Teton Glacier, the largest glacier in the park, a remnant of the Little Ice Age. It survives because the mountain shelters it from the strong summer sun.
Below the ice, look for a pronounced ridge of rocky debris. That's a moraine, and it marks how far the glacier reached in the late eighteen hundreds. In summer, when the winter snow melts away, gray ice and cracks called crevasses show through. Those cracks tell you the glacier is still flowing downhill under its own weight, even as warmer temperatures melt it back.
While you're looking, find the dark stripes in the rock. Black diabase dikes, like the one on Mount Moran, show on the southeast flank of the Grand Teton and on the east face of the Middle Teton. There are up to eleven active glaciers in this park, and Teton Glacier is one of the few you can see from the road.
History, on the way there
On the way: Chapel of the Transfiguration
Next, we're heading to the old ferry crossing and the Chapel of the Transfiguration, close to where we began.
In 1892, Bill Menor settled on the Snake River at a spot where, in his words, the river was altogether in one place. Most of the Snake runs in wide, braided channels. Near Moose it narrows to one, and that made it one of only three crossing points in the valley. He built a ferry that used the river's own current to push the boat across, a design that dates back to ancient times. In winter, when the river was low, he carried people over in a cable car. He also ran a store, a smokehouse and a blacksmith shop, sold vegetables to the dude ranches, and served as postmaster.
In 1918 he sold his homestead and ferry to Maud Noble, the daughter of a prominent Philadelphia family, who had first come to the valley in 1915 looking for adventure. The ferry ran until 1927, when a bridge was built just downstream and made it obsolete. Two years before that, Maud Noble gave land beside the ferry to the Episcopal Church, for a chapel.
Point 12 · At the stop
Chapel of the Transfiguration
This is the Chapel of the Transfiguration, built in 1925 on the land Maud Noble gave. It served the workers and guests of the nearby dude ranches, and the church still usually holds Sunday services here in summer. If it's open, step inside and look past the altar. The window behind it frames the Grand Teton, one of the classic views in the park.
Next door is the Menors Ferry Historic District, with the old ferryman's cabin and store, a replica of his ferry, and Maud Noble's cabin. On July twenty-sixth, 1923, she hosted a meeting in that cabin. Horace Albright, the superintendent of Yellowstone, sat down with a few local dude ranchers, businessmen and a rancher. They were worried about the cabins, gas stations, dance halls and billboards springing up in front of the mountains. Most of them didn't want a national park. They wanted the old West kept as it was, a museum on the hoof. But the plan they started in that cabin led, through twenty-seven years of argument, to the park you've just seen.
That's the end of the tour, and thank you for spending it with me in Grand Teton National Park.