Above the World So High

Your first feeling is unvoiced disappointment. You step off the plane at Jackson, Wyoming and look north at the Tetons. Against the bright unclouded sky of that Sunday afternoon they look like cardboard cutouts, a child’s vision of jagged-edged Alps pasted against a blue felt sky, grey for the most part, with dirty-edged patches of snow that are the glaciers, remnants of the mighty ice-crushers that carved the peaks, gouged out the lakes, dumped millions of tons of sand, gravel, rock, and debris into the forty-mile long valley that the early fur traders called Jackson’s Hole, after one of their own.

We sort ourselves out: George and Jodie Stone, who have driven up from Denver to meet us; Crawford and Daphne Greene and young Daphne, 13, pretty, bright, and immediately daunting (she has brought her hiking boots); Jim and Ann Buckley and son David, 15; Jane, my sister and (erstwhile?) traveling companion; and I. We drive the thirty-odd miles to the lodge through fields of sagebrush, punctuated here and there by buckrail fences and high ranch gates, the whole brought alive by a muted dusting of color, a carpet of wildflowers: blue, purple, pink, yellow, orange, crimson, flame red, the swatches of blue lupines setting off the more spectacular Indian paintbrush and scarlet fireweed.

PL

About the Author

Priscilla L. Buckley

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Your first feeling is unvoiced disappointment. You step off the plane at Jackson, Wyoming and look north at the Tetons. Against the bright unclouded sky of that Sunday afternoon they look like cardboard cutouts, a child’s vision of jagged-edged Alps pasted against a blue felt sky, grey for the most part, with dirty-edged patches of snow that are the glaciers, remnants of the mighty ice-crushers that carved the peaks, gouged out the lakes, dumped millions of tons of sand, gravel, rock, and debris into the forty-mile long valley that the early fur traders called Jackson’s Hole, after one of their own.

We sort ourselves out: George and Jodie Stone, who have driven up from Denver to meet us; Crawford and Daphne Greene and young Daphne, 13, pretty, bright, and immediately daunting (she has brought her hiking boots); Jim and Ann Buckley and son David, 15; Jane, my sister and (erstwhile?) traveling companion; and I. We drive the thirty-odd miles to the lodge through fields of sagebrush, punctuated here and there by buckrail fences and high ranch gates, the whole brought alive by a muted dusting of color, a carpet of wildflowers: blue, purple, pink, yellow, orange, crimson, flame red, the swatches of blue lupines setting off the more spectacular Indian paintbrush and scarlet fireweed.