Day 4-Grand Tetons

Woke up at 6am and by 7am we were in full swing making breakfast: “Freedom” (not “French”) Toast, fruit salad with mangos, pineapple, strawberries, and other fruits, and cowboy coffee. This was my first GT breakfast since I slept through it before.   I made myself useful playing doctor for people with blisters and cuts, since today was a hiking day. Dave drove us to Jenny Lake for hiking, kayaking, or a boat ride over to the Tetons trails and a hike up to inspiration point.  Lots of people. Met several people connected with a hiking family reunion. Took a picture to prove I did it!

Found the bus, and it was a short ride back to camp—at camp people were chilling and reading or playing cards with beer and Frisbees, and me typing my semi-blog in my lounge chair. Nice. BTW, I’ve given up on the ‘blog’ since I seldom have internet! So this will be an email or series of them depending on where we end up.  

Dinner was vegetarian chili with everything in it, an awesome green salad with the works, tortilla chips, and water or beverage you bought. No seconds…I guess after the hike people were hungry!  After dinner most of us took a walk to Jackson Lake to catch the sunset. We picked a treacherous path down to the water, but young to old we all made it down. The 20-somethings from Germany, Holland, England, and Switzerland immediately stripped and jumped it. The woman from Moscow (maybe older than me) wanted badly to get in but was shy about it. So the Chinese/Bostonian woman and I shielded her for modesty while she stripped to undies. She said it was warm, so I’m guessing it’s a top layer effect, because after all the lake is fed by a rapidly shrinking glacier! Three of us looked on, not swimming but enjoying the views of the Teton glaciers and the comradery (and a hike in wet clothes was not appealing, though a bath was tempting).

Back at camp Dave had gone to bed, and I was immediately pressed into duty…Fix my blister? Converter for charging phone? Campfire?  Dave made it clear if we made a campfire I would stay with people to put it out and clean up, and make sure the bus was locked up and bear-safe (no food). With everyone spread all around the group camp I dumbly I thought I might get away with skipping campfire and crawling into bed with my book. But no, so I delegated finding the stuff to make the campfire, and I rounded up the troops playing cards with the promise of banana boats. Turns out the Welsley neuroscience professor (a frequent flyer on these GT trips) was an expert on banana boats, which I never paid attention to when the soccer girls made them at campfire. AK Rosenquist had started the tradition and it survived generations of team campouts, but I never knew exactly. This was a huge hit, especially with the twins. Most of the 2^nd pack of marshmallows and all of the 2^nd box of graham crackers and 2^nd box of Hershey bars were used up. Put the foil away, packed up the food into the bear box and went to bed.