Rock Stars

Driving south from Grand Teton National Park we stopped off in the town of Jackson where there were an assortment of strange creatures.....

I told Ralph to save the polygamy for Utah but he wouldn't listen

If I ca find these somewhere I will bring some back - A shop owner told me of another scary one, "kill a wolf save 100 elk" he suggested an alternative "kill a redneck, save 100 wolves"

Elk antler arch, try saying that after 4 beers

Just outside Salt Lake City, Utah we spoke to a couple of guys loaded up with all their worldly goods on their bikes.  They were hoping to hitch a lift in a lorry, they are permanently on the road and travel about like this hitching and cycling. They shared some scavenging secrets with us such as checking the propane camping gas canister recycling bin at the campsite as people often put them in before they're empty, sure enough Ralph has scavenged successfully.  They also check for distributors of food and camping equipment and round the back they find perfectly good items which for whatever reason have been chucked in a skip at the back, sell by dates, shop returns.  They showed us their artisan bread, fancy granola, new watch, new tent, you name it they had it......

They wouldn't let us take a picture of them, so we opted for their bikes, they had great beards.

Ralph has found a new favourite TV show - Extreme Couponing, needless to say he shouted a lot at the television.

We were now heading into South east Utah, home to five national parks.

Arches national park is beautiful but crowded, to give three quick examples, the Fiery Furnace, a collection of amazing close knit rock pillars which can only be explored with a ranger as its so easy to get lost in, yet you must sign up 2 weeks in advance if you are to get on this hike (needless to say we had not planned ahead). Secondly, the sunset at delicate arch is a must but it is quite a surprise to get round the  last corner of the hike to find tens or even hundreds of people. Lastly the campsite is bookings only, despite what our out of date guide book said (damn our attempts to be mildly sustainable), when we got their the next available slot was not for another fortnight. In a word plan ahead and be prepared for crowds even in October!

I am glad to see that despite 4 months of American cheeriness (the response to' how are you?' from everyone here is 'I'm GOOD!' while in the UK we are Not bad or OK) I have not lost my ability to moan like a true Brit, it must be the lack of decent cheese (anyone going for an extended trip in the US should bring a cool box of cheddar with them - if you can get it past customs). Anyway, it can be safely said that the Arches themselves are amazing just look.

Health and safety gone mad

La Sal mountains in the background

Balanced rock

An evening walk to Delicate Arch, the most famous arch in the park for sunset, along with the rest of the world! The trail goes over slickrock and so is marked by cairns as you can't see the way otherwise, not too bad during the day but a bit tricky at night on the way back.

Delicate arch

It was a little crowded but still very pretty

Landscape arch

Uinta chipmunk

Partition arch

 Navajo arch

Double O arches

We visited some petroglyphs just outside Moab, despite being thousands of years old someone thought it would be great idea to graffiti the word GAY across part of them -genius!

bear breasts

Grand Teton national park is situated to just South of Yellowstone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Teton_National_Park and is named after the mountain range, dubbed the three breasts (a bit too pointy in my humble opinion), by the french fur trappers in the area. Tetons is an amazingly scenic park but I would advise against going in October and November.  Founded in 1950 the Tetons are the only national park to allow Elk hunting within their boundaries. Considering the vast swathes of huntable land outside the park this seems more than a little crazy, especially as the justification is to control numbers of elk which are fed supplementary food! Anyway half the park (the other half is no go for hunters thankfully) is filled with people in florescent orange hats  (so they don't shoot each other Rumsfeld style) driving around in their massive pick up trucks way over the speed limit.

Teton was aso the location of our third and closest bear encounter on a trail. At the top of a pass we met a beautiful adolescent black bear. He was less than 20 feet away from us, he was very brown and for a moment I thought he might be a baby grizzly, this was very scary as it meant it's mother might be close behind! However, as we got a closer look we could see it was a young brown bear, I started to get the camera out as it stood on the path staring right at us, but Fiona advised that I start waving my hands and talking to the bear instead. This moment was very entertaining, as we waved and talked to the bear he just stood there looking completely mystified as if to say "what on earth are you doing?". Then instead of walking off, the bear started to walk straight towards us, just as the grizzly had in Denali all be it at a much closer distance this time. But again the bear was just looking for cover so he could pass in peace, ducking into some trees and bushes about ten feet to our right.

Fiona told me later that she had been cursing me in her head for not purchasing any anti-bear pepper spray, we had discussed it at length and thought that we would be so unlikely to use it, even if the bear performed a bluff charge at us, that we may as well not have it at all. Instead we opted for making plenty of noise, although this bear was obviously a bit deaf.

This is the section of the path we met the bear, the keen eyed among you be able to see a small black furry lump in the centre of the picture

Another spot the bear pic, again at the centre of the picture, you can't really see him but you can see how brown he was.

The Teton range

Previous campers had made armchairs out of stones, very comfy and a great view.

Getting to be professional campers now - check out the deployment of the asymmetric tarp

Grand Teton

Starting off on the Cascades trail, it was great with masses of good Pika habitat on the way.

This is where we saw a Pika dragging its food along behind it for the first time -so cute!

Jenny Lake

Having only seen 4 moose on our trip so far (one in the rockies and three in Denali), we were keen to see more and everyone had told us Teton was packed with them. We spent hours of our two days looking for them and had had almost given up when Fiona's keen eyes spotted this mother and baby on the way out of the park.  Luckily we went back for a better look as I had convinced myself it was just horses and only stopped for a better look at the last minute!  These may be our last Moose....