Titties and tatties

One can only assume that the French explorers who named the mountain “Grand Teton” were without the company of females for some time, as its resemblance to a “big breast” (ie. the English translation of "Grand Teton") was pretty much lost on us. Nonetheless, the splendid anatomy of Grand Teton and her neighbours provided happy hiking and sight-seeing for us for four days.

The Teton range rises abruptly from the floor of the glacier-scoured valley known as Jackson Hole. The peaks themselves are accessible only to experienced rock-climbers, which of course we are not, so we instead satisfied ourselves with walks on the lower slopes around Jackson Lake and Jenny Lake. The most pleasing walk took us into the secluded Cascade Canyon, giving us a peek at Grand Teton herself, who is mostly hidden behind lesser peaks from the main Jackson Hole valley.

On a tip-off from a ranger, just before sunset on our last night in the Tetons, we drove a couple of miles along a dirt road to the Snake River, with the intention of ogling some beaver. However, while we were walking down to the beaver lodge we met a very amiable local man with a film camera. It turns out this guy has spent his whole life filming wildlife in the Tetons, and he actually shot the beaver sequences with David Attenborough in the BBC's “The Life of Mammals”, at this very spot. He was such an interesting chap that by the time we finished talking to him it was almost too dark to see the beavers! Nevertheless, we did get down to the beaver pond with enough light to make out the furry little torpedoes zooming around, knawing at trees and tending to the dam (unfortunately it was too dark for photos!).

The following day we indulged in some retail therapy in the town of Jackson, at the southern end of the Tetons. Jen got some new walking boots, and our bed got an extra thick blanket – the nights are beginning to get mighty chilly at this elevation! The lovely town of Jackson is a year-round sportsman's and naturalist's Mecca; the four antler arches in the town square attesting to the huge number of elk in the vicinity.

From Jackson we took something of a detour from our intended route south into Utah, instead heading west into Idaho. We had been persuaded of the charms of Idaho by Mike and Jason, some friendly fellows we'd met in Yellowstone. There are two facts that I think well reflect the character of Idaho. Firstly, that the name “Idaho” is completely made up. An early settler fabricated the word, took a liking to it and told everyone that it was the Shoshone Indian name for the region. The second fact, of which you should apparently already be aware, is that Idaho is famous for potatoes.

Accordingly, an attraction we found on our second day in the state was the Idaho Potato Museum. Although some of the data presented were perhaps a little dodgy (like the statistic in the above photo!), the museum was unexpectedly fascinating, with such marvels as the world's largest potato crisp on display. We also got a free box of dehydrated hash brown mix each - hoorah for free stuff!

The second and even more fascinating stop on our Idahoan Odyssey was the Experimental Breeder Reactor (EBR-1) laboratory, now turned museum, where usable electricity was first generated from nuclear fission in the early 1950s. The lab is appropriately sited many miles from civilisation in the vast desert plains of Southern Idaho. As the name suggests, EBR-1 was also the first breeder reactor, which means that in the course of the fission of Uranium fuel, it actually produced additional Plutonium fuel for use in future reactions. Andy was particularly handy with the remote manipulation tools they developed for handling radioactive waste.

One of the lab's less successful (and costly – over $1 billion in the 1960s) exploits was an attempt to build nuclear-powered jet planes. The rotting carcasses of these giant beasts now languish in the museum car park.

Nearby, on the edge of the desert plain is the weird landscape of Craters of the Moon National Monument. Here, dried lava flows encase the ground in a barren, black crust whose tortuous formations give the place an eerie other-worldly ambience.

The flows stretch for several hundred square miles and encompass hundreds of tubular caves, through which the lava once flowed. Roof collapses into the lava-tube caves provide easy access for exploration. The lava is such a good insulator that ice is found in the caves year-round, despite temperatures sometimes rising to 140 Fahrenheit outside (though thankfully not while we were there!).

After Craters of the Moon, we headed up into the mountains to drive the Custer Motorway – a 50 mile stretch of unsealed road that was formerly a toll road to the 1880s gold-rush towns of Custer and Bonanza. Once home to more than 600 gold-rush hopefuls each, Custer and Bonanza are now ghost-towns.

It is not difficult to discover gold on the motorway – the stream-beds sparkle with tiny specks of the stuff. However, despite out best efforts panning with our dinner-plates, we just couldn't get the goodies out!

It seems that we are not alone in our inability to get at the stuff – the mining operations in this area and many others besides were never profitable. A prime example of one such operation was to be found rusting along the road in the ditch where it was left in the 1950s. This immense dredger, floating in a self-made pond, operated by chewing up the gravelly ground in front of it, shaking the debris to settle out the gold, and spitting the waste out of the back. It used 12,000 gallons of diesel per day and left a massive scarred trail of dredgings through the forest. And after 15 years of operations, it was abandoned, having made a net loss of $40,000.

With great relief, we made it off the bone-shaking Custer motorway, back to tarmac roads, turning south to the Sawtooth Mountains. We spent a couple of days here, walking and swimming in the lakes (you can just see Andy's head in the water in this pic, as well as the jagged profile of the mountains, which gives them their name), before heading south across the plains again to Utah.

Next, we will be visiting the centre of the Mormon world, Salt Lake City.