Grand Teton National Park - Jenny Lake

Today was another memorable day. We headed south from our cabin at Flagg Ranch and entered Grand Teton National Park. 

We stopped at the Colter Bay Visitor Center for trail recommendations and the location of moose habitats. 

Based on those recommendations, we headed to the String Lake trailhead. From there we walked south to the northern tip of Jenny Lake.  We walked along the western side of the lake then hiked up to Hidden Falls...

then climbed the steep and rocky trail to Inpiration Point.

We took a break at here before walking into Cascade Canyon. As we started to enter the canyon, we could see that a storm was coming. 

We secured all of our electronics in plastic ziplock bags. We decided to continue on since there was no lightning and thunder, just rain. 

But then the lightning appeared and the thunder echoed in the canyon. We sought shelter under a group of pine trees along with 3 other families caught in the storm. When the next bolt of lightning appeared, Amanda took a video (just audio since the camera was in her pocket staying dry) of the the thunder echoing in the canyon. 

(I'll post the video here soon, if possible)

A few seconds later we saw dust rising on the mountain to our right and the roar of a rock slide that lasted a couple of minutes. We figure that lightning strike must have hit the mountain. We hoped the rock slide didn't block our trail back to the car. 

After about 20 minutes the storm had passed through. The other families headed back down the trail but we decided to keep hiking into the canyon, giving the steep trail down a chance to dry out. 

The weather in the canyon was beautiful and we were nearly the only people there since everyone else had headed down. 

We headed back down to Jenny Lake and took pictures of our storm shelter on the way down. 

When we finally returned to our car, after 10 miles of hiking, we decided to drive down to Jackson Hole for dinner and ice cream. 

On our drive back to our cabin, we took a detour to drive down a road that goes along a stream that the rangers told us they had seen moose in the past. We got lucky and saw 2 bull moose on our drive. Again, it was getting dark so picture-taking was difficult. 

We finally got back to our cabin at 10:30, took showers and decided we would sleep in tomorrow morning before heading up to the geyser basins in Yellowstone tomorrow.