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Grand Teton National Park is located in the northwest corner of Wyoming in the valley known as Jackson Hole and is only a few miles south of Yellowstone National Park. The highest of Teton peaks is the Grand Teton, which rises to 13,770 feet above sea. Eleven other peaks reach above 12,000 feet, high enough to provide a suitable environment for twelve mountain glaciers. The eastern face of this mountain range is rather dramatic while the western face is gentle sloping and displays the angle of tilt of the Earth's crust. Although the Teton Mountain Range is one of the youngest in the Rocky Mountain Range, it displays some of North America's oldest rocks. Grand Teton National Park consists of over 309,000 acres and is visited annually by over 2,600,000 people. The official National Park Services website for Grand Teton National Park is http://www.nps.gov/grte.
The rocks that make up the Teton Mountains began formation over 2.5 billion year ago during the Archean portion of Precambrian time and were thereafter infringed upon by later Precambrian (Proterozoic) dark-colored diabase dikes around 1.2-1.3 billion years ago. Ancient hard crystalline rock including darker-colored metamorphic rocks and lighter-colored igneous rocks is the principal bedrock found in the Teton Range. When considering all of the ranges in the Rocky Mountains, the Tetons are among the youngest. During Paleocene time (roughly 50 million years ago), there was structural uplift of the Teton Range. The range we see today began climbing towards the sky some 9 million years ago as a result of the Teton fault. This fault is termed a normal fault as a result of its motion. The western side of the fault was uplifted, while the eastern side of the fault moved downward. (Source: Winona State University)
Our original plan was to pass by the Tetons on our way to Yellowstone National Park's south entrance, but we discovered that we had arrived just one day before the seasonal opening of the south entrance. Forced to find an alternative, we opted to drive back south, around the southern flank of the Teton Range, into Idaho, then north along the gently-sloping western side of the Tetons to Montana, where we'd be able to enter Yellowstone's west entrance. Although this took extra time, we got to see some scenery we hadn't planned on seeing. We stopped short of West Yellowstone to stop at Earthquake Lake, a lake created by a debris dam created during a powerful 1959 earthquake.
We were able to leave Yellowstone via the south entrance, giving us another opportunity to view the Tetons. It's not hard to see why the Tetons are a climbing and ski mountaineering paradise, and several of us left that day with resolutions to return someday and get a better look.
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