Driving Teton Pass

In 1997, my daughter and I drove to Jackson, Wyoming, so she could check out an environmental college. It was June, and that summer had extreme flooding all over the western states. There wasn't GPS or mobile phones (or phone photos!). I took a paper map and plotted our route with a highlighter before we left home.

We flew to Boise, Idaho, rented a car, and drove first through the Valley of the Moon National Monument and Preserve. There were yellow flowers and yellow-headed Bobolinks everywhere we looked all over the black lava fields. It is incredible in June, so if you can go, do so!

After that beautiful portion of our drive, we began to run into road issues; flooding had closed part of our route. We stopped at a park overlooking a river gorge and realized we couldn’t continue the planned route. Some nice strangers standing beside us at the gorge gave us directions for an alternative road. I marked the map and went off, but further up the road, there were more detours for the flooding. We were witness to incredible sights; ranches and farmland all turned to marsh or ponds, lakes of rainwater surrounding homes, and water edging up to the narrow country roads.

The road is dangerous and below is from their state highway division warning trucks and others. (I didn't know all of this at the time of our "adventure.")

Usually, it is six hours of driving, but all the turns and re-routing took longer. We saw flooding in Idaho Falls and continued on toward Jackson, Wyoming. We were on Wyoming Highway 22, Teton Pass, and at the beginning, I thought, “Do I ride the brakes all the way down? Do I put the car in low? NO! That wouldn’t work.” It was extremely nail-biting and frightening. There wasn’t snow or ice, but the Pass is so curvy and dangerous it was stressful. Thank goodness, I was much younger then! Be sure to watch this Youtube video of the road I found to see the vistas, but also the curves and scary drive:

We arrived in Jackson (the residents have said they do not like their town to be called Jackson Hole, at least back then; now it is full of wealthy people, and movie stars are landowners) and found a motel. Then, the main street in town was about eight blocks long. My daughter still kids me about always turning out of the motel and going the wrong way; at the time, every day, she said, “How can you get lost in this tiny town? Why do you turn right when you should turn left from the motel?”

She decided against the small college, and I think she didn’t want to be that remote and far away from all she knew. She went to a state college two hours north of our home.

Speaking of finding or losing one’s way, today, my husband and I were driving, and he wanted to go to a plant nursery that we visited once last year. I told him it was the next exit, so he got off. At the light, he decided it was one exit down and was headed back onto the freeway, but I told him he should go to the right and pointed out a house I remembered.

“Nope, it is the next exit.”

“Okay, you will exit there and then end up winding around back to this road to our right.”

“Maybe, but this is how I’m going,”

Readers, who do you think was correct? ME! He had to wind his way back. My husband rarely tries to “find” his way. He uses an app called WAZE for directions and to be warned of speed traps, accidents, and slow traffic. I pulled up WAZE right before he drove back onto the freeway, and it also said to turn right. He couldn't; there were too many vehicles in that lane.

The day before, we had visited our daughter at her condo. When we left her condo, I turned the correct way down the hallway but didn’t remember taking the elevator to her floor. I am including this in the story for a reason. As we turned toward the plant nursery, at the exit he insisted was right, I turned to my husband and said, “I don’t remember how to get out of our daughter’s condo building, but I remembered how to get to this nursery!”

#tetonpass #jacksonwy #adventure #roadtrip

Copyright © 6/10/2024 by Andrea O. Corwin

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Below is what happened at Mount Rainier National Park last August when we tried to go at night to see the Perseid Meteor Shower.