27 August 2017, Sunday

This morning the campground empties early. We say goodby to our neighbors and they wish us a safe journey. Before leaving, they tell us that their favorite restaurant in Grand Teton NP is The Grille next to Signal Mountain Lodge. O and I gaze around empty loop N and decide that Sunday morning may be the best time to look for walk-up campsites.

We put a few finishing touches on Vincent’s reorganization after breakfast and drive back to the Visitor Center. Here we purchase a hand-beaded purse from Juan and Josie Broncho, the Grand Teton NP guest artists of the week. Juan is Shoshone and Josie is Paiute. We will use the handcrafted, beaded purse on our travels for collecting quarter and dollar coins for washing. Josie tells us the colors of the beading are traditional. The brown background represents the earth, blue is for the sky, green for trees and red for fire.

Next we embark on a bit of a geological tour, but first we check out the Signal Mountain Restaurant for lunch. It is very good and reasonably priced. After lunch we drive the loop road. The views continue to be hazy due to forest fires west and north of here. At the Moran pull-out we can view a 775 million year old igneous intrusion into metamorphic gneiss and granite that is 2.7 and 2.5 billion years old respectively.

At the Cathedral Group Turnout near Jenny Lake we can barely make out the escarpment delineating the Teton Fault (which began moving about 9 million years ago) as we gaze through the haze with our binoculars. We turn back north after seeing Jenny Lake and drive up Signal Mountain road. At the summit we look out over the valley and see glacial moraines, small lakes (the residua of melting glacial ice blocks) and meadows, interspersed with forest. The trees can only grow where glacial outflow has not washed away good soil. There are sharp delineations between forest and meadow.

Once again we return to camp and relax before preparing dinner. At 9 pm we attend a ranger presentation about grizzly 399. Born in 1996, she has produced many cubs. The usual rate of survival to adulthood for grizzly cubs is only 50%. 399 has a 62% success rate. Her daughter, 610, has an 82% success rate. The main causes of cub death are being killed by speeding motorists or being killed by an adult male grizzly which wants to mate with the mother. The moral of the story is to carefully obey speed limits when driving in the parks.