Jenny Lake

South Jenny Lake is your next left, then a third of a mile in to the big lot. If you go in, it's a left coming back out, onto Teton Park Road, going north. This is the most popular place in the park, and those four hundred and fourteen spaces go early. Once you're in the lot, take the boat across, in season, and Hidden Falls is an easy mile round trip with three hundred feet of climb, so allow one to three hours; Inspiration Point is one point eight miles round trip from the boat and five hundred and fifty feet up, and without the boat the falls are a moderate four point nine miles on the shore trail. Restrooms are in the lot and by the visitor center, the store has snacks in season, and hours vary. On the trail, carry water, keep your bear spray within reach, leave the headphones in the car, because the park strongly discourages them on the trail, and feed nothing, squirrels included. When you reach the water, look across at that U-shaped notch. That's Cascade Canyon. A glacier came down it, sat where the lake is now, and left a ring of debris around itself that's all trees today. How deep did it leave the hollow? You'll read four hundred and fifty-six feet in places. The scientists who surveyed the basin found about two hundred and forty, and I'll take their number. What's on the bottom beats the number anyway. The lakes along this mountain front sit right on the fault, and each big earthquake leaves its own layer across the lake floor. Scientists pull sediment cores from Jenny and its neighbors, and read back the quakes the way you'd read a diary. This water almost got a dam of its own. In nineteen nineteen a plan surfaced to dam the outlet, raising Jenny Lake twenty feet and Leigh Lake ten. People here had already seen what a dam did to the shore of Jackson Lake, and many of them turned against it. The Park Service blocked the plan. If you parked, look for a small building at the plaza on your way to the boat. Most people walk right past the park's first entrance station, moved here when newer buildings replaced it, and still welcoming visitors. Last, the name, because it deserves a quiet minute. Jenny was a Shoshone woman from Chief Washakie's band who married a British trapper, Richard Leigh, known to everybody as Beaver Dick. In eighteen seventy-two they both helped the Hayden Survey, he as guide, she with the camp. Hayden's men thought enough of them to name the lakes at the base of these mountains for them, Leigh Lake, Jenny Lake, and Beaver Dick, which you know as String Lake. But Jenny is the name her husband gave her. Her Shoshone name isn't known. So the most popular place in the park carries the name of a woman whose own name nobody can tell you.