The bull elk and bears made our trip to Grand Teton National Park a memorable one

“Hurry, jump in the van, there is a herd of bull elk coming from Mormon’s Row,” yelled the driver of a sight-seeing group in Jackson Hole. “We will probably be able to intercept them before they cross the highway.”

Sure enough, we could barely see the elk as they moved along the road in Grand Teton National Park as cars began stopping to get pictures. We were able to get to them because the cars were too close together for the elk to cross between them. The elk were on their early morning trek from the flats near Mormon’s Row to the Snake River. An electronic sign on the highway warned drivers coming from Jackson of this daily migration with “ELK, ELK, ELK, NO KIDDING, ELK, ELK”.

The large lead bulls were finally able to find a break through the cars to cross the road ahead of us while the smaller bulls trotted by us. Once all 17 of them had crossed the road, they grazed and meandered, feeding, across the sagebrush flat.

My wife and daughter had planned a two-day trip to the park, allowing my son-in-law and I to join them. We had spent the night in a tent/cabin at Colter Bay so that we could get up early enough to watch the sunrise on the Teton Peaks at Schwabachers Landing on the Snake River. We, along with 200 others, were early enough but a huge cloud moved in to shut out the early sun rays to color the Tetons.

A little disappointed, we headed to a favorite spot of mine to see if we could locate some moose; Blacktail Ponds Overlook, a couple of miles south of Schwabachers Landing. We were able to see two cow moose, but they stayed mostly hidden in the willows as they got their breakfast. Hummingbirds and Yellow warblers were busy collecting nectar from the blooming Fireweed at the edge of the willows.

We thought it was funny that the guide of the tour group had his spotting scope set up looking toward Mormon Row, while his clients were watching for the moose in the willows. He was the one who spotted the elk and alerted us to them. We went back to the Blacktail Ponds Overlook, but the moose had bedded down in the thick willows to get away from the hot sun.

This was the second day of our Grand Teton National Park excursion and the first day had also been a memorable one. As we were driving along the Moose-Wilson Road to hike into Phelps Lake, we ran into a small bear jam. A mama black bear with a cub was feasting on the serviceberries on a hillside. We could just get a glimpse of them from time to time as the bushes covered them.

I will cover the Phelps Lake hike in a future article, but it was a beautiful and an enjoyable hike. After our hike, we made our way to String Lake to do some wading and relaxing before heading to Colter Bay for a planned dinner and a check-in at our tent-cabin.

My daughter had found a “red” alert on her phone about slow traffic between Jackson Lake dam and the Oxbow Bend on the Snake River. That usually means there is a bear jam so after dinner we headed back down U.S. Highway 191 to see what it was. Sure enough, there was a female grizzly bear causing the slow down.

Like the other bears we had seen earlier, she was feeding on berries in brush taller than she was. We stayed for about half an hour, only getting short glimpses of her as she worked the hillside. There were four “traffic control” rangers there and one of them told me that she was one of the local “highway” bears in the area and was there almost every day.

He told me that even though she did not have a cub this year, she uses the road to protect her and her past cubs from the male grizzlies when she has them. The boars do not like to be by the road but when the females are close to the road as she is, she is in danger of being hit by the traffic. On the day that we saw her, she had crossed the road three times and that is why the rangers were there to stop the traffic when she wanted to cross. She was still there the next morning when we left, so the rangers were there in force again.

It was a great and an enjoyable outing for the four of us and we will be making another trip this year to try to catch the sunrise at Schwabachers, as well as see more bears and listen to the elk bugle.