”Anyone caught NOT THINKING SNOW will be sent home,” threatened the hand-lettered sign in Llama Louie`s office at the Teton Village ski resort. Llama Louie deals in snowmobile trips and other wintertime excursions. He, and the sign, looked serious.
Yet, I wasn`t thinking snow, actually.
I don`t ski, I don`t toboggan, I don`t snowboard. I always had associated snowmobiles with the rusting yard junk in seedy Duluth neighborhoods.
But someone had suggested checking out the Tetons-instead of, say, Puerto Rico-as a way to shake off winter blahs. Great natural beauty, he said. Old West atmosphere. Wildlife (human and otherwise). Relaxing lack of pretension. (Who could wear pearls or Armani-anything to a valley that`s inelegantly called Jackson Hole?)
So I stood outside Llama Louie`s and tried to get myself worked up about the snow deprivation everyone around me seemed to be suffering. A few doors down, a ski shop had posted a sign in its window, too. Something about mountain conditions ranging from groomed slopes to glare ice on a 19-inch base, the same base that had been sitting there since Thanksgiving.
”Any snow would be an improvement,” the scrawled message declared.
If Llama Louie were a mindreader, he might have sent me packing. At that point, my chilled psyche still focused on bikinis, sand, rum, and I don`t mean the hot-buttered kind.
Llama Louie`s plaid flannel shirt, scraggly moustache, menacing sign and appraising eyes finally did jolt me into a more northerly frame of mind. I imagined a day in the wild guided by Llama (as surely I would come to know him), hopping moguls on a snarling Skidoo, scoping otter and muskrat on pristine white mountain trails, tracking bison and elk, finishing up the experience with a hearty outdoorsman`s meal in the Mangy Moose Saloon above his office. Hey, it really is possible to think snow!
After I told him what I wanted, however, Llama Louie began working the phones, chatting up snowmobile tour operators with a Kojak-like familiarity
(”Got any room for a single to Yellowstone tomorrow, babe?”).
Llama Louie turned out to be a kind of travel agent, a recreational broker, not a scout at all.
”I never leave this office,” he told me. ”I`ll set you up with somebody good, though.” (He did. See accompanying story.)
And so it began to dawn on me that a slush-bred tenderfoot from the salt flats of Chicago might come to appreciate winter in the mountains. The beauty of the Grand Teton (named, goes the story, by French trappers with a mammary fixation) certainly helped persuade me.
On a snowless day, the Teton Range stabs improbably at the cobalt sky like the imaginary peaks in a Hungry Artists landscape. Jackson Hole-the flat, 660-square-mile elevated valley that separates the Teton and Gros Ventre ranges-offers the kind of pure, snow-covered acreage urbanites never see, unless they happen to look out the window at that precise moment between the last blizzard and the day`s first poodle.
No gray soot, no yellow spots, no misaimed newspapers. Just aspen, pine, animal tracks and the slinky patterns left by people who travel on slats. Dry air and generally negligible winds render the low temperatures toothless.
Of course, to a certain segment of the population, primarily visiting skiers, too many snowless days impose an ineffable gloom. Their heads tend to droop listlessly on the lifts. They sit at long tables in the mountainside espresso shop and write mournful letters home. The Teton Village equipment and clothing boutiques, about 12 miles from the town of Jackson, started running
”end of winter” sales in the first week of February, when Midwestern winter is just warming up, so to speak.
Still, something about life in Jackson Hole tends to put rattlesnake juice in one`s step. Restaurants and bars range from continental to cuspidor, but require neither suave pretension nor trail-hand gristle. A visitor can mosey into any establishment, from Jackson`s Big Horn gallery to the subterranean Pub beneath the Sojourner Inn at Teton Village, and expect a welcome.
Late one frosty night I heard unmistakable party sounds coming from the Antler Inn motel parking lot, which surprised me, because, around here, that kind of activity generally takes place indoors. I strolled over and found an outdoor heated swimming pool, fogged in steam and roiling with tourists in bathing suits.
”Come on in,” a couple of them shouted at me.
I declined the invitation, but I could begin to see that a week at the feet of the Tetons would serve admirably as a vacation destination, even if I lacked the reckless compulsion to hurtle down mountains.
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Here was an opportunity to relax and enjoy that delicious sense of putting something over on the rest of the world. Staring idly out the motel window while skiers lug equipment to the bus stops serviced by Southern Teton Area Rapid Transit (START) is a lot like taking a day off and waving to commuters who are forced to go somewhere vile.
In the morning, all over town, skiers struggle with their gear and race the clock. Lifts open at 9 a.m. and stop running at 4; the sport and the weather require long socks, long underwear, sweaters, a jacket, waterproof pants, gloves, boots, goggles, a canteen and food. They put in a lot of work before the fun begins.
Much better to stretch, yawn and plot a day with no particular demands. One weekday morning, for example, I drove the car north on U.S. Highway 89 to the headquarters of Grand Teton National Park, about 10 miles north of Jackson. It was a leisurely trip, punctuated by frequent stops at scenic turnoffs that permit the imposing Teton Range to show off.
At the visitor center in Moose, Wyo., Pat Jamieson, a National Park Service ranger, had little to do but lean on the counter and answer the questions of one family that just happened to be passing through.
”Where`s Jenny Lake from here?” the father asked. ”I hear it`s beautiful.”
Jamieson looked wistful.
”It`s about eight miles north, on that road right outside the parking lot. But only the next three miles are plowed. And you have to remember that Jenny Lake, like all the lakes, is just a big, flat, snow-covered plain this time of year.”
The father groaned and led his brood back to the station wagon.
”Some people like to come here in the winter because it`s quieter,”
Jamieson informed me. ”There are places you can cross-country ski in the park and see no one else out there.”
Occasional visitors do motor into Grand Teton National Park as far as snowplows permit, and the reward is an even closer look at the looming walls of rock and lodgepole pine. Paradoxically, a season that alpine (downhill)
skiers consider snowless leaves just the right amount for everyone else. The athletes crave fresh powder; we require only enough to provide the kind of blanket that makes for a white Christmas and sets off the stunning scenery.
Cross-country skiers and snowshoe hikers can venture farther into the wilderness, luxuriating in pure solitude and the wonderful sense of proprietorship that Native Americans and pioneers must have felt. Nordic
(cross-country) skiers follow marked trails, while park rangers lead pedestrians on regularly scheduled hikes (snowshoes provided) from late December to mid-March.
After looking around for a while, I drove a mile east on the park road to Dornan`s, a hewn-log complex with clothing and gift shops, gas station, deli, liquor store and a bar/dining room with immense picture windows overlooking you-know-what.
A great many Jackson Hole lodging and dining establishments have been situated to take full advantage of the view, but Dornan`s combines a rare accessibility (no mountain driving required) with affordable quality. Some customers engage in serious wine-tasting; others order hearty $6 sandwiches from the grill. A few people merely loiter over a cup of coffee and drink in the magnificence of their surroundings.
At such a moment it becomes easy to picture the Grand Tetons as they must have looked to members of the Shoshone tribe or to the 19th Century cowboys and trappers who followed them into Jackson Hole, named for David E. Jackson, a prominent trapper of the early 1800s. The area was remote and isolated in the early days. Cattle rustlers used it for a hideout; Shoshones, beset by tribes farther east, embraced it as a refuge.
The landscape has changed very little. All but about 3 percent of northwestern Wyoming is government-owned, which puts a definite crimp on shopping malls and condominium developments.
Horning in on elk
Immediately outside of Jackson, the 4,600-population metropolis that anchors the region, thousands of elk graze in a federally protected winter home.
In other parts of the country, all those acres might have been covered by tract housing long ago. Here, some 5,000 to 8,000 elk arrive at their 72-year- old refuge in late fall to escape the harsh realities of the high country. They dine on alfalfa-hay pellets until the warmth of spring, ignoring the thousands of humans who enter their midst for a close look at the best entertainment in the region.
The elk are visible from U.S. Highway 89 and a series of turnoffs, but to the naked eye, the animals look like so many raisins sprinkled on white frosting. Fortunately for sightseers, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and private concessionaires conduct rides on horse-drawn sleighs that haul tourists right into the herd.
The sleighs leave every 20 minutes from a compound on Refuge Road, about 4 miles out of town. Wildlife lovers, the mildly curious and avid hunters on triggerless holiday pay $7.50, bring their cameras and toss a lot of questions at guides such as Danny Luton, a woodsman with 16 years of experience taking tourists across the refuge in winter and leading hunting and fishing expeditions in the other seasons.
On my trip, two crack shots from Cody all but drooled over the proximity of such big-game bucks standing 5 feet at the shoulder, weighing up to 800 pounds and sporting antlers with as many as seven points a side.
”That`s a dandy,” one of the hunters said, marveling as a particularly big one came by. But naturally Luton had seen bigger.
”You take that rack and put it together with the rump on that other one over there, and you`d really have something,” he said.
The hunters nodded sagely and aimed their cameras. Now and then the bulls would butt one another, locking horns and shaking their heads until finally breaking loose.
”If they really get stuck, the way we get them apart is come out here with a rifle and shoot the antler all to pieces,” Luton told his passengers. ”We tried it the other way, getting around them and sawing them off, but that pretty near got one of us killed. The elk get nervous about that. So we come out here, take one shot and it`s done. He gets a headache, but it`s better than us dying.”
After that twilight run (the last sleigh leaves at 4 p.m.), visitors depart with the peculiar, high-pitched bleating of elk in their ears and head for the plank sidewalks of Jackson, a town that tries mightily to live up to its frontier image even while succumbing to rampant gentrification.
Jackson`s nod to its elk neighbors can be seen on the corners of the park that dominates the town square. Tall arches built from thousands of antlers
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(presumably shed, not shot) and strung with tiny white lights strike just the right note of rugged delicacy.