2012/07 Western USA trip - Teton back roads |
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Sunday July 8th
Despite the River Road experience we thought we’d try some more back roads; the weather was sunny again. Pilgrim Creek Road is rocky, flat, and narrow, and an early sighting of a bull elk was encouraging. The road ended at a campground in Teton national forest, just outside the park. It looked like a good future campsite if we ignored all the warnings about grizzlies. We walked through the flowers to the lake on the map only find that it’s actually a waterlogged meadow. But then when we got back to the main road we saw the real Pilgrim Lake Road, so I don’t know where we’d been!
Next stop was the Oxbow Overlook, a quiet backwater of the Snake River, where Phil and I had kayaked in 2000 for a few hours. This is a perfect spot for reflections of the mountains, and this time there were also pelicans, geese, and otters in the picture too. Then I noticed that the road traffic 
had stopped, a classic bear jam, but I couldn’t see the bear. It had crossed the road and gone through the shrubs behind us. Then we saw the heads in the river, a mama grizzly and three cubs were swimming across. Mama is on the right, with the three cubs following on the left. In some of these pictures, you can see the characteristic round ears and hump of the grizzly; black bears have pointy ears and no hump.
The bears were on the opposite side of a wide river so I have no close-ups but you can see that bears shake themselves dry just like a dog or a moose.
Suddenly our quiet little parking area was jammed with people and cars. We watched all the bears clamber out, and then we saw mama
bear running through the shrubs and it was all over. However, as John said, there’s some satisfaction in explaining to late comers “Yes, it was a bear; yes a grizzly, with t
hree cubs. But they’re gone now.”
After all the excitement of the bears I did eventually get some pictures of the mountains reflected in the oxbow and of some of the oxbow’s other wildlife.
We drove up to Two Oceans Lake and went for a walk, but it was one of those hikes where you don’t get the spectacular view until the far 
end. This was too far for us so we turned around when we reached some open meadows, full of paintbrush. I was happy with the walk; it’s very rare that you find waist-deep flowers under the trees, a beautiful sight.
The next road took us out of the park again to Pacific Creek, a forest service campground for horse riders. Most of the infrastructure and machinery looked ancient, an interesting place to walk around, still amongst the wildflowers.
Back on the main road we were driving on the other side of the Snake River, viewing the area we’d been driving in the previous evening’s
storm. The picture shows the bench formations along the river; the River Road wanders along the upper bench, occasionally dropping down through a chaos of rocks down to the lower. In the other direction we could see a bison herd in the distance.
For our last stop we drove down to Schwabacher’s Landing, another backwater of the Snake, still looking for moose. 
Instead we found beaver, quite a few of them.
As we were leaving, the storm clouds rolled in again and we were treated to some gorgeous light displays with sunbeams shining between the mountain peaks. We had a mixture of wind squalls, showers, and rainbows as we made our way back to the campsite, a repeat of the previous evening’s weather.
Up in Okotoks, Sandie and the family went into Calgary to see the Stampede, really a combination of a rodeo and a state fair, something for everyone. They had a hot sunny day, watching riders and horses and eating expensive and unhealthy food.