Teton Point

Count the steps. Teton Point Turnout is just ahead on your right, and it's a right back onto the highway. The land below it drops toward the Snake in terraces, cut by meltwater each time the glaciers let go. Across the valley the Middle Teton stands south of the Grand, with Mount Owen and Teewinot to the north. The river isn't finished. A track called River Road used to follow these banks, until the Snake kept eating the ground out from under it. The park's rule book now says, in these words, the road's existence has been terminated. Ease off on this stretch. In twenty sixteen this highway had forty-three percent of the park's wildlife collisions, more than any other road, and the worst of it was the stretch you're on. Moose use roads as travel corridors, and the Jackson herd fell from over four thousand in nineteen ninety to an estimated four hundred and fifty in twenty sixteen. After dark the limit drops to forty-five miles an hour, and bison and moose can weigh up to a ton. Daylight doesn't clear you, because sixty percent of known pronghorn collisions that year came by day. Those same pronghorn are on one of North America's longest land migrations, along a path they've used for at least six thousand years. Off to your left, far down the valley, look for the scar of the nineteen twenty-five slide, about fifty million cubic yards of Sheep Mountain. High above these flats, in fall, a grizzly is scooping up army cutworm moths by the pawful.