Named after Jenny Leigh, the Shoshone wife of British fur trapper Richard “Beaver Dick” Leigh, Jenny Lake is a hole formed about 12,000 years ago by glaciers pushing rock and debris out of Cascade Canyon. The many cascades and creeks in this canyon filled the hole, which is about 420 feet deep, with water. When Grand Teton National Park (GTNP) was founded in 1929 it was only about one-third the size it is today, and Jenny Lake was one of only six lakes included in it.

For the first time since the Civilian Conservation Corps constructed the earliest official trails around the lake in the 1930s, its built environment is worthy of its natural environment. Jenny Lake has long been the park’s flagship attraction — more than half of its visitors stop here — but this was despite the man-made improvements to the area.

Previously, Jenny Lake visitors suffered crumbling retaining walls, excessive and buckling paved pathways, a lack of signs and confusing visitor-created shortcuts. Once they reached the lake — it’s several hundred feet from the parking lot — it took away their breath: Jenny Lake sits at the mouth of Cascade Canyon, in the perfect spot to reflect the snaggiest of the snow-capped Teton peaks to the west, which rise more than 6,000 feet.

When the Civilian Conservation Corps built trails around Jenny Lake in the 1930s, only several thousand people visited the park annually. Since then, the number of visitors to the park has grown; in 2017 the park got 4.9 million visitors, which is less than half of what the country’s most-visited national park, Great Smoky Mountains, got, but enough to land Grand Teton in the Top 10. Over the decades new trails were hastily added around the lake. Also, visitors looking for shortcuts created “pirate” trails that were used enough they came to look like real trails. The South Jenny Lake area was a mess.

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Just off Interstate 80 in Sinclair, Wyoming (population 415), the Sinclair Refinery processes crude oil from the United States and Canada. Every day the refinery, one of the region’s largest, converts 85,000 barrels of oil to gasoline, diesel, propane, and other petroleum products. But the town may soon become famous for a cleaner sort of energy, as the gateway to the biggest wind farm in the Western Hemisphere.

South of the highway here lies the Overland Trail Ranch, 500 square miles of rugged terrain where several thousand black angus graze among the dusty buttes and sagebrush prairie. Soon the feeding cattle will wander beneath a thousand towering wind turbines. Called the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project, the ranch, owned by Denver-based billionaire Philip Anschutz, could potentially generate up to 3,000 megawatts of electricity­—enough to power one million homes. The project has been crawling through the regulatory process for more than a decade, but if all goes as planned, the first 500 turbines will be churning out electricity by the end of 2020, and the remainder will be up and running sometime in 2023.

In the ten years since Power Company of Wyoming (the Anschutz Corporation subsidiary running the project) began working to create Chokecherry and Sierra Madre, wind energy has boomed nationwide. The cost of wind power has dropped by 66 percent since 2009. Over the past 15 years, wind has gone from being a trace component of the U.S. power mix to holding a 6 percent share, and today, it’s a leading source of renewable energy in the nation.

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When most people think of backpacking in the West, their minds drift to destinations like Colorado’s iconic 14ers, John Muir’s Sierra, the Pacific Crest Trail, or the jagged North Cascades in Washington. Very few have heard of the Wind Rivers in Wyoming — and those who have like it that way. Here’s what they’re missing.

The Winds stretch for over 100 miles along the Continental Divide, just southeast of much more popular places like Yellowstone and the Tetons. They are a truly wild and rugged wilderness, protected by two National Forests and the Wind River Reservation. All told, the range has more than 30 peaks higher than 13,000 feet and over 130 glaciers dispersed across three-quarters of a million acres of public land.

It’s a backpackers’ playground. There are nearly endless reasons to visit this part of Wyoming. Solitude is ample, trips will push your limits and challenge your skills, and the range is downright gorgeous. Tall granite spires, serene lakes, and endless wildflowers create picturesque views around every corner. The wildlife is abundant — including the notorious mosquito swarms.

There are two well-trodden zones in the Winds — Cirque de Towers and Titcomb Basin — for good reason. While most of the range is objectively beautiful, these two areas seem to be pulled from another world.

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Standing in a thick patch of pine and fir, mosquitoes swarming her face, Anna Ortega lifted a radio receiver into the air, angling it back and forth as she listened for the blip, blip, blip of a mule deer collar.

A zoology graduate student at the University of Wyoming, Ortega was tracking Deer 255, a doe that had braved road crossings, fences, wolves and other hazards to get here. Somewhere in this forest near Island Park, Idaho, a dozen miles west of Yellowstone National Park, Deer 255 was laying over for the summer.

Armed with bear spray, binoculars and datasheets, Ortega and two field assistants followed the blips among trees dappled with early July sun. They picked their way through knee-high grass and shrubs, the occasional snap of a twig underfoot as startling as a slamming door. The blips were strong and clear: Deer 255 was close.

While not all mule deer migrate, some travel a hundred miles or more between their summer and winter ranges. With a one-way migration of 242 miles, Deer 255 holds the record for the longest-documented land migration in the Lower 48, traveling even farther than her herd-mates, all of which winter in the Red Desert of southwest Wyoming.

Her trek to Idaho from the Red Desert exemplifies the surprises scientists are still encountering with this well-studied ungulate. And as mule deer populations throughout the West remain below target levels, it underscores the need to protect the wide tracts of landscape that sustain migrating wildlife.

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The Snowy Range Scenic Byway crosses the Medicine Bow Mountain Range and includes nearly 30 miles of the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest portion of Wyoming Highway 130. It passes between the towns of Centennial and Saratoga, but it’s what is in between that is spectacular.

Originally a wagon road built in the 1870s, the road was paved in the 1930s and designated as the nation’s second Scenic Byway in 1988. Snow usually closes the highest section of the road early to mid-November and snowplows traditionally open the road in May right around Memorial Day weekend. Guess when we arrived? Two days after Memorial Day weekend. So, yay!

My brother Dave and I stayed in Laramie the night before, then leaving Laramie and traveling west on the Scenic Byway, we drove through the open plains of the traditional Old West where the deer and antelope still play. Sorry. 27 miles west of Laramie, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, lies the historic mining town of Centennial, and the start of the uphill climb.

My hiking buddy Dave told me stories about the Snowy Range being one of the most beautiful places he had been. Since we were so close we just had to check it out. Dave (Griztrax Dave, not brother Dave) was right. It’s stunning. We spent about three hours crossing the 30 miles from Centennial to Saratoga. There are plenty of stops and lots to see.

Particularly when you get to the Libby Flats area with its CCC built stone observation tower you can seemingly see forever. You are surrounded by snow capped mountains in every direction and alpine lakes around every turn. Starting on the sagebrush prairie and climbing to a high-altitude alpine environment with old growth spruce-fir forest containing wind-shaped krummholz, we experienced all the ecosystems presented by the Rocky Mountains. All the while the 12,013 foot Medicine Bow Peak towers overhead.

Brother Dave and I agreed while enjoying lunch later in Saratoga that we would definitely come back in the future to tackle some of the plentiful hiking trails found along the byway. There are lots of campgrounds available to stage into the designated wilderness areas found within the national forest. Below is a gallery of photos I took while we were passing through. Perhaps they will entice you to also visit the Snowy Range Scenic Byway in south-central Wyoming.

This post was created by Jeff Clark. Please feel free to use the sharing icons below, or add your thoughts to the comments. Pack it in, pack it out. Preserve the past. Respect other hikers. Let nature prevail. Leave no trace.

Devils Tower, an important landmark for Plains Indians tribes long before the white man reached Wyoming, was called Mateo Tepee or Grizzly Bear Lodge by the Sioux. A number of legends describe the origin of Devils Tower.

“One legend tells of seven little girls being chased onto a low rock to escape attacking bears. Their prayers for help were heeded as the rock carried them upward to safety. The claws of the leaping bears left furrowed columns in the sides of the ascending tower. Ultimately, the rock grew so high that the girls reached the sky where they were transformed into the constellation known as Pleiades.” — information sign along Hwy 24

Devils Tower rises dramatically 1,280 feet above the picturesque Belle Fourche River. Recognizing its unique characteristics, Congress designated the area a U.S. Forest Reserve in 1892 and then the nation’s first national monument in 1906. The tower was a centerpiece in the 1977 Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

When you spend three weeks on the road visiting many of our nation’s wonderful wild attractions you are bound to have some days when the weather isn’t ideal. My brother Dave and I were really quite fortunate to have mostly bright, sunshiny days for our adventures. Not so, however, on the day we visited Devils Tower. There was a low cloud cover that obscured the top of the tower, and a drizzly mist was falling throughout the time we were there.

We did put on the rain gear for the must see 1.3-mile walk around the base of the Tower though. It starts across the parking area from the Visitor Center. A short, steep section leads you to a junction where you can go either way to walk around the base. The trail goes through ponderosa pine forest and the talus field of fallen boulders. Evidence of periodic prescribed burning can be seen within the forest, the last in 1998.

I did manage to get a few pictures as we approached the tower from miles away on Hwy 24, and from the Tower Trail. Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments area below the gallery. Enjoy!

This post was created by Jeff Clark. Please feel free to use the sharing icons below, or add your thoughts to the comments. Pack it in, pack it out. Preserve the past. Respect other hikers. Let nature prevail. Leave no trace.

One hundred twenty years ago, Wyoming’s Big Horn Forest Reserve was signed into existence by President Grover Cleveland. This legislation outlined that reserves had to meet the criteria of forest protection, watershed protection and timber production. In 1905, the Forest Service was established with the same resource protection focus. By 1908, the forest’s name had been officially changed to “Bighorn.”

W.E. Jackson served as the first forest supervisor on the Bighorn from 1897 to 1910. At that time, he oversaw eight districts and their rangers. The ranger’s job was to map the forest, maintain trails, administer sheep and cattle grazing permits, and protect the forest from wildfire, game poachers, timber and grazing trespassers and exploiters. The life of a ranger was lonely at times and could be dangerous.

The economic boom of the 1920s brought an insatiable demand for timber. This sparked the first large-scale timber sales done by the Forest Service, and the agency began to play an increasing role in providing timber for the country. During this same era, Americans gradually had more time for leisure and enjoyed improved modes of transportation. This created a desire for developed recreation facilities on the national forests. Campgrounds, swimming areas, roads, trails and picnic areas were all built and improved to meet the demand.

Along with the developmental focus came the opposite idea of setting aside some lands to remain undeveloped. Forest Service employees and early proponents of this concept, Arthur Carhart and Aldo Leopold, recommended that areas remain roadless for recreational use. This idea created areas that would be maintained in a primitive status without development activities, such as the Cloud Peak Primitive Area in the Bighorn National Forest, which was approved in 1932.

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The camp is located 22 miles from the Turpin Meadow trailhead along the famous plateau where North Two Ocean Creek makes a baffling break into two, sending Pacific and Atlantic creeks toward their namesake oceans. It’s usually reachable terrain by mid-June, once the sunshine in the high country has erased the last signs of winter atop Trail Creek Pass.

Right now, in the early fall, it’s about as bustling as it gets in the Bridger-Teton National Forest’s Teton Wilderness, a treasured Wyoming high country that’s bounded by Yellowstone National Park, the Absaroka Range, Buffalo Valley and the Snake River.

Summer can be packed, too, the result of fishermen drawn to fabled cutthroat trout runs out of Yellowstone Lake and up the Yellowstone River and its tributaries. Continental Divide Trail through-hikers and packrafters populate the 900-plus-square-mile wilderness during the narrow season the trails are dry. Then there are the “progressive campers,” guided adventurers who typically come in on horseback to eat good meals, relax and see the sights of a landscape that’s more remote than any other in the Lower 48.

Count Mike Leonard, a temporary tenant of the Winter camp, in that last category. A ninth-generation North Carolinian, he’d had a stubborn and ultimately successful lifelong ambition to see the Parting of the Waters. It started when he read about Atlantic and Pacific creeks’ mysterious split in a Yellowstone book his mom gave him when he was a grade schooler.

“That just caught my eye when I was 9 years old,” Leonard said. “It just took me 55 years to get here.”

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For centuries, the Medicine Wheel in the Bighorn National Forest in Wyoming has been used for prayer and vision quests by the Crow Tribe and other Native people.

Visitors come from all over the world to hike up Medicine Mountain to the wheel, a National Historical Site managed by the Bighorn National Forest with guidance from the Medicine Wheel Alliance.

The Medicine Wheel’s origins are uncertain. Many believe it was built by the Sheepeaters, a Shoshone band whose name is derived from their expertise at hunting mountain sheep.

The most common Crow story is about how Burnt Face, a handsome young Crow, fell into the fire while entering his mother’s tepee. Embarrassed of his severely burned face, he left his people to live in the mountains, where he built the Medicine Wheel based on instructions he received in a vision from the Sun.

Red Plume, a Crow chief during the time of Lewis and Clark, found great spiritual power at the Medicine Wheel.

At 9,462 feet elevation, on a clear day the Medicine Wheel provides a view of the Teton Mountains more than 100 miles away. It sits halfway between Lovell and Sheridan, Wyoming, just a dozen miles from the Montana border.

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From its spawning grounds 28 air miles below Yellowstone National Park’s southeast corner, the fabled river enters a narrow deep canyon fighting its way down a boulder-strewn course. For about 10 miles the newly formed river passes through a forest of pine, spruce and fir fitted with small meadows and willow flats. The 1988 fires that burned a great deal of acreage in Yellowstone National Park also touched this corner of the Teton Wilderness, and as a result some new aspen growth is being observed. The conifer mix is changing, and lodgepole is coming back in places, while exhibits of wildflowers — including arnica and fireweed — are sprouting up under the burnt snags.

Numerous unnamed streams and waterfalls tumble off the Continental Divide to the west and from Thunder Mountain and volcanic cliffs on the east. Industrious beavers have created ponds in many places. The rough Continental Divide Trail follows the river on its north and east side, with many small but easy creek crossings. Here the river connects with some of the nation’s finest wilderness landscape — beautiful, untamed and gaining its wild soul. Far from any road, this is the gorge of the Upper Yellowstone.

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