Passport

A Park Hub Field Guide

Lat 43.6534° N
Long 110.7186° W

Elevation6,320 – 13,775 ft

Wyoming · Stamp 09 / 63

Grand Teton

National Park · Established 1929

A wall of granite with no foothills to soften the approach. The range simply starts, and it starts thirteen thousand feet up.

Area310,044 acres

TrailheadMoose, Wyoming

Visitors3.4M / yr

Scroll to begin the ascent

Live · Park open 24 hrs Teton Park Road open to vehicles 1 active alert 72°F · valley breeze Live layer, from the National Park Service

Best windowJun–Sep · wildflowers peak in July Getting there30 min from Jackson · 5 hr from Salt Lake City Fee$35 / vehicle · 7 days

★★★★★ 4.9 from 14 travelers 2 visitor stories 3.4M annual visitors Grounded in live NPS data

Teton · Mile 01 · The Story

No foothills.
Just the wall.

Most mountain ranges make you earn the view: miles of foothills, a slow gain in elevation, a gradual introduction. The Tetons skip all of that. They rise seven thousand vertical feet straight out of the flat sagebrush floor of Jackson Hole, with nothing in between, because the fault that built them slips a little more with every earthquake and the valley floor keeps dropping while the peaks keep rising.

The range is young by mountain standards, under ten million years old, which is why the peaks are still so sharp. Glaciers carved the horns and cirques you see today, and a few small ones still cling to the highest north faces. Grand Teton itself tops out at 13,775 feet, and on a clear morning from Mormon Row it looks close enough to touch.

Come for the classic shot of a weathered barn under an impossible skyline. Stay for the elk in the sagebrush at dawn and the moose in the willows at dusk. Read the story, trust the live data above for what is open today, and when you leave, collect the stamp.

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“

There they were, the beautiful Tetons, glittering in the pale blue morning like a chain of cathedrals, and I remember the strangeness of feeling nothing but total quiet and awe.

Adapted from early Jackson Hole homesteader accounts of first sighting the range

Snake River · Below the Range

"The mountains are calling and I must go."

John Muir

Teton · Mile 02 · The Essentials

Best Things to Do in Grand Teton

Six ways to spend your time, from a barn photograph at dawn to a full day on the water beneath the range.

See

Mormon Row at sunrise

The T.A. and John Moulton barns, weathered wood against the sharpest skyline in America. Come before the light gets hard.

Everyone · 45 min

Canoe or kayak Jenny Lake

Paddle out from the boat dock with Cascade Canyon splitting open directly ahead of you. Rentals at the marina in summer.

Families · half day

Drive

Teton Park Road

The classic loop past Jenny Lake, Signal Mountain, and Jackson Lake, with a pullout for every angle of the range.

Casual · road-trippers

Bike

The Multi-Use Pathway

Paved, mostly flat, and running the length of the valley floor with the Tetons on one side the whole way.

Families · e-bikes

Camp

Jenny Lake Campground

Tent-only, walking distance to the lake and the shuttle boat. First-come, first-served, and it fills by mid-morning.

Campers · arrive early

Explore

Schwabacher Landing

A short walk to a beaver-pond bend of the Snake River that mirrors the range on a still morning. The valley's best reflection.

Photographers · dawn

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Free AI Trip Planner

Plan Your Grand Teton Trip

Answer a few questions right here — we'll map your day, stop by stop, with a route, timings, weather, and a packing checklist grounded in real park data. No account, no leaving this page.

Free preview · no card required

When the Crowds ComeMonthly visitors · tap a year

Illustrative shape · wires to official NPS visitation stats · summer peaks shown in gold

Schwabacher Landing · First Light

"In wildness is the preservation of the world."

Henry David Thoreau

Teton · Mile 03 · Trails & Viewpoints

Best Hikes in Grand Teton, by Difficulty

Every trail rated honestly, with distance, climb, and whether the wildflowers are worth the extra mile.

String Lake Loop

Easy

3.4 mi+100 ft~2 hr

A flat loop around a shallow, warm-for-the-Tetons lake with the range reflected the whole way. No permit.

Taggart Lake Trail

Easy–Mod

3.8 mi+500 ft~2.5 hr

Through a 1985 burn now filled with young lodgepole and wildflowers, ending at a glacial lake under the peaks. No permit.

Jenny Lake to Hidden Falls

Easy–Mod

5 mi+550 ft~3 hr

Take the boat shuttle across Jenny Lake, then a short climb to a waterfall and Inspiration Point above it. No permit.

Cascade Canyon (to Lake Solitude)

Strenuous

14.4 mi+3,000 ft8–10 hr

The Tetons' signature canyon hike, glacially carved and often full of moose and bear. Carry bear spray. No permit for the day hike.

Static Peak Divide

Extreme

16 mi+5,400 ft10–12 hr

The highest maintained trail in the park, a full-day grind to a saddle with a view straight down Death Canyon. No permit for the day hike.

Permit · overnight

Grand Teton Summit

Technical

~13 mi+7,000 ft2–3 days

Non-technical by mountaineering standards but still real climbing on the final pitches. A backcountry camping permit and route-finding skill required.

Backcountry permits via Recreation.gov · required for overnight camping in the Grand Teton climbing zones · no permit for day hikes

Grand Teton National Park at a Glance

1 Craig Thomas Discovery & Visitor Center

2 Jenny Lake

3 Schwabacher Landing

4 Oxbow Bend

5 String Lake Trailhead

6 Mormon Row Historic District

Stops shown in visit order. Build a plan above and this map updates to your exact stops.

Teton · Mile 04 · The Valley Floor

Wildlife in Grand Teton: Animals You Might See

Tap any animal to learn its story. Soon, the app will let you log what you spot and keep a life list for every park.

The National Elk Refuge sits just south of the park, and thousands winter there, but summer scatters them across the sagebrush flats at dawn and dusk.

The valley's most photographed resident, browsing the willow flats along the Snake River. Give a moose far more room than seems necessary; they are unpredictable and fast.

Grizzlies work the huckleberry slopes and canyon bottoms all summer. Carry bear spray on any trail past the valley floor and know how to use it before you need to.

The valley's most visible predator, mousing through the sagebrush in broad daylight. Smaller and scrappier than a wolf, and far more likely to be seen.

Watch the river bends for a sudden vertical dive and a fish clutched in talons on the way back up. Nests are visible on the high snags along the Oxbow.

Wakes from hibernation in March and is gone again by August, packing a whole year of activity into five warm months. Feeds nearly everything else in the food chain.

The fastest land animal in North America after the cheetah, cruising the flats at highway speed without apparent effort. Not a true antelope, despite the road sign.

Plant Life in Grand Teton: What Grows Here

Scarlet-orange spikes scattered through the meadows in July. The color comes from bracts, not petals, and the plant is partly parasitic on nearby grasses.

Whole hillsides turn purple-blue when lupine peaks, usually right alongside the paintbrush for a two-color meadow that photographers plan trips around.

Aspen groves along the valley floor turn brilliant gold in early fall, often a single interconnected root system sharing one genetic identity across acres.

Fast-growing pines that reseed aggressively after fire; much of the Taggart Lake trail passes through a stand that started over from a 1985 burn.

Crush a leaf between your fingers after rain and you have the actual smell of Jackson Hole. The gray-green shrub covers the flats and shelters the pronghorn and sage grouse.

Twisted and slow-growing on the drier benches above the valley floor, sharing the same patient survival strategy as its Utah cousin.

Fun Facts About Grand Teton

Fact 01

The Teton Range is one of the youngest mountain ranges in the Rockies, under 10 million years old, and still actively rising along the Teton Fault.

Fact 02

Jackson Hole is a graben, a valley formed by the ground dropping as the mountains rise. The valley floor and the peaks have been moving apart for millions of years.

Fact 03

Mormon Row's T.A. Moulton Barn is one of the most photographed barns in America, framed against Grand Teton itself with no foothills in the way.

Fact 04

The park protects part of the Path of the Pronghorn, the longest land migration corridor still intact in the lower 48 states.

Teton · Provisions

Gear for this parkvia AvantLink

Bear spray (required backcountry)REI

Trekking polesBackcountry

3L hydration packOsprey

Stay nearbyvia Hipcamp

Forest sites near Jackson
Twenty minutes from the south entrance, aspen shade and elk for neighbors, from $38 a night.

Free Teton checklistdigital · $0

The printable trail and packing checklist in the field-guide style. Take it, join the trail list.

Teton · Mile 05 · From the Field Journal

Go Deeper on Grand Teton

Stories, guides, and hard-won tips from the trail. The full Grand Teton deep dive lives on the journal.

Photo Guide

★TetonPark Hub · Collected

Your passport

One stamp,
one story.

Log the visit, keep your story, and watch the map of all sixty-three fill in behind you. Every stamp has a keepsake worth holding.

Teton · Mile 06 · Where to Next

Keep the Journey Going

Next park

Yellowstone

An hour north through the Rockefeller Parkway: from granite peaks to the world's geyser basin.

Open Stamp 10 → The collection

All 63 Parks

See the full map and track every stamp you have earned.

View the map → Plan

Build a Trip

Turn Grand Teton into a road trip with a custom, day-by-day itinerary.

Start planning → Go deeper

The Grand Teton Deep Dive

The long-form guide: every trail, season, and secret, on the journal.

Read it →

Carry the field guide

Offline maps, your passport, and every park in your pocket on the trail.

The Book

Keepsake

The Park Hub field guide

The printed edition, part atlas, part journal, one story per park.

The Shop

Prints · pins · passport

Take Teton home

Field-guide posters, enamel stamps, and the passport book to fill in.

Fifty-four parks remain

"The parks do not belong to one state or to one section... they belong as much to the man of Massachusetts, of Michigan, of Florida, as they do to the people of California, of Wyoming, and of Arizona."

Stephen Mather · first director of the National Park Service

Begin your journey