![]() Please follow my adventures on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube. Click here to learn how I can help you plan your next trip. Join The Big Outside to get full access to all of my blog’s stories. Click here to sign up for my FREE email newsletter. ![]() Hi, I’m Michael Lanza, creator of The Big Outside, which has made several top outdoors blog lists. ![]() In the frosty early morning, we sat on the rim of Death Canyon with binoculars, counting upwards of a dozen moose several hundred feet below us on the canyon floor. During the night, I heard heavy clomping just outside our tents, and unzipped the door to see a bull elk almost close enough to lean out and touch it, staring back at us as if trying to discern what manner of beast lay before him. But one of the locals decided to interrupt our rest. After pitching our tents near the rim of Death Canyon, with a view of the jagged Tetons unlike anything these native Easterners had seen before, we tried bouldering on those massive rocks, but discovered they had edges that sliced like razors.Īfter watching the sunset slowly paint the peaks golden, we turned in for a well-earned crash. Boulders as big as small houses lay strewn about this tableland, their sides and edges so neatly squared off they look quarried. Knackered from the miles and the alpine sun and not yet acclimated to the high elevations, we nonetheless felt pulled along the Teton Crest Trail over Death Canyon Shelf, a 9,500-foot bench sandwiched between a three-mile-long, 500-foot-tall cliff and the deep trench of Death Canyon. On the long ascent of the canyon’s headwall to Fox Creek Pass, we practically waded through vast meadows of wildflowers.ĭeath Canyon Shelf on the Teton Crest Trail.Īnd it only got better from there. We saw deer, moose, lots of birds, and black bear scat. One of the several major east-west-oriented canyons carved deeply into the eastern front of the Tetons, pouring creeks into Jackson Hole and the Snake River, Death Canyon abounds with life. The sun starts baking the open lower section of the Death Canyon Trail by mid-morning so our gorgeous hike beneath soaring granite cliffs and along a roaring cascade quickly also became a hot, dusty climb.ĭeath Canyon is not the kind of place its name conjures. In the morning, probably tired from the long previous day of traveling to Jackson, we got a slow start under packs heavy with too much old, oversize gear. ![]() We had hiked less than an hour into the backcountry of Grand Teton National Park the night before, camping in the dense forest surrounding Phelps Lake, where we saw mule deer grazing at dusk and the wind howled through the dark night. ![]()
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