Eclipse 2017: Before | themiddleteton

My obsession with the Tetons and this upcoming eclipse started five years ago after a professor told a story of feeling an earthquake while in Mexico City. How amazingly surreal and mind blowing would it be to have the ground bounce and wiggle! Something so reliably solid and certain, very quickly shown to be taken for granted! Unstable and wobbly in the most literal sense! Earthquakes are so random, though. I could move to California, but I hadn’t yet been uprooted from Minnesota and the idea of moving was foreign and out of my reach. Tornadoes and volcanoes are equally stunning natural phenomenon, but they’re too unpredictable. A total solar eclipse would be a mind boggling event. The day turning to night! I looked up when the next total solar eclipse was passing the United States, and there was one in 2017, and another in 2024. I looked up the path of the 2017 eclipse, and immediately fell in love with the Tetons and the idea of witnessing the eclipse from the summit of one of the peaks. It would be perfect: The climbing routes lose their snow in late summer, and the eclipse will happen around 11:30 in the morning, right when climbers need to be descending to avoid thunder storms. If the eclipse was going to be later in the year, or later in the day, witnessing it from a mountain summit would be impossible.

The Tetons are an iconic symbol of the American West. They lie within Grand Teton National Park in the Northwestern corner of Wyoming, and they’re a part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. (Yellowstone National Park is just 40 miles north, in Southern Montana.) Unlike other taller and steeper ranges in the US, the Tetons are unique for their abrupt and dramatic rise above the flat plains within the valley of Jackson Hole. The Teton’s iconic “Cathedral Group” of snowcapped peaks are featured in Western movies as classic as John Wayne’s Shane and as modern as Brokeback Mountain. The Moulton Barn is the most photographed barn in America, and probably the world.

A disclaimer: I hope that this isn’t a “too long / didn’t read” post. I expect that best friends and people I care about will have the patience to read through it, but even if you don’t know me, I think that this read will have some value. I hope that you’ll fall in love with the Tetons, and reflect on your own bucket-list, your own obsessions. It’s a long read, but it’ll be done in a jiffy. Tell me how I could improve my writing! What’s missing? Criticize the shit out of this piece, and do it anonymously if you must!

Even if my knee heals, the summit of the Middle Teton could end up being like an epic game of “king of the mountain.” The Tetons are gentle giants; colossal but calm, and absent of crowds and tourists. That was just my imagination. I just called the Jenny Lake Ranger Station whose rangers are the main authority on climbing the park, and talked to a ranger named Chris. He told me that the park has 20,000 visitors on a regular August day. On the day of the eclipse, though, there will be an additional 50-100,000 people. It’s probably the busiest the National Park will ever be, and perhaps it will be the most people to ever be in the state of Wyoming. I asked him if people will be waiting outside the rangers’ station at 8:00 in the morning to buy overnight backcountry camping permits for the next day, and he replied “Oh, definitely.” A third of the backcountry (and regular) camping permits are open for reservation, with the rest being “first come, first serve” sites. To get a better idea of the demand for campsites in the park, consider that I attempted to reserve a site on the first day of 2017, but all the sites had been taken by noon when I checked the website. The ranger suggested summiting another peak, or even going to Casper, Wyoming. But the summit of the Middle Teton has become an infatuation that has nagged at me for years.

For years I’ve been looking for people to go with me. In 2014, as a reminder, I gave my friends postcards featuring the Tetons, with the date “8/21/17” written on them, as a reminder. More recently, after asking friends and strangers on social media if they’d be my partner, I have had a few people commit to coming. Recently, a couple have dropped out but one old Coworker, Gabe, has made a full commitment. He’s an old coworker from Convention Grill, where we washed dishes and made malts together. While doing school observations for my teaching degree, I got to sit in the classroom of my old high school Physics teacher, a class that Gabe was currently in. (Gabe is a few years younger.) I reserved a rental car that we can sleep in, and one that’s big enough to hold bikes, since we will likely have to park the car outside the park and then ride in on the bikes.

The Moulton Barn under the Cathedral Goup, with buffalo in the foreground. This picture has it all: Awesome light, color, depth, foreground interest and an epic backgroun. I hope to get this shot a couple mornings before the eclipse, but instead of bison, it will be hundreds of photographers. This photo was taken by Matthew Potter.

My left knee is starting to bum out because of all the training for the Middle Teton summit. In the past week my knees have been on a 15 mile hike through Chicago, a 20 mile bike ride, and three climbs up and down the Fairmont Hotel, for a total of about 1,100 feet up, and then back down. It all sounds like good preparation for climbing a mountain, but 1,100 isn’t even a fifth the height of the Middle Teton, whose summit is a little over 6,000 ft above the parking lot at the Lupine Meadows trailhead. It’s four times the Empire State Building (with its spire included), and it’s three and a half times as tall as the Sear Tower with it’s antennae. It’s over twice as tall as the tallest building in the world, the Burj Dubai. (2.2 times as tall, to be exact.) It hurts going up stairs, and I can’t even bike to work any more. I had to take the “el” train to work today and will probably have to keep taking it up until the trip, which is only a week away. I’m going to try to record my whole Teton experience, both before and after. It’s for the sake of remembering with detail, since I have a bad memory, and because I recently read a 90-something-year old woman’s advice that “to be a writer you must write.”

Other precautions have been made. I recently bought a weather radio so I know if afternoon thunderstorms are coming. After being trapped in a lightning storm in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Northern Minnesota (perhaps the most scared I have been in my life) I realized how crucial a weather radio is to any trip into the wilderness. More climbers die from lightening on the high peaks than from falls. Also in the mail came a heavy can of bear spray to help me sleep at night: After all, the Tetons are grizzly country.

Although anxious and nervous, I’m becoming more and more excited. A month ago, while standing on the double-decked Wells Street Bridge in Chicago, I realized that an earthquake could be replicated. Certainly, an eclipse isn’t the only time that the day can turn to night. A Midwestern storm or an Arizona dust-storm can make a sunny afternoon abruptly dark. But from 6,000 feet above Jackson Hole, will Gabe and I be able to see the moon’s shadow traveling across the land? Confused by the supposed 15 degree temperature drop, will the marmots jump from their cliffs like lemmings, and will the coyotes be heard howling in distress? Will I even be able to make the summit? Or am I destined to watch the eclipse with the 100,000 tourists in the valley below?

The 6 mile hike (with 6,000 ft of elevation gain) from Lupine Meadows (1st circle on the right), up to "The Meadows" (the second circle), where I plan to camp on the first night of the hike, to the summit of the Middle Teton the next morning. There will be National Park Service Rangers at the Lupine Meadows Trailhead checking to see if overnight hikers have backcountry permits.

From "The Meadows" (where I plan to camp after hiking about half-way up the mountain), you hike up to the "saddle" between the South Teton and the Middle Teton. The saddle is shown here at the bottom right corner of the picture. Once we reach the saddle, we head North toward the summit, up the "Southwest Coilour" route. A "coilour" is a narrow gully, or valley going up the side of a mountain.The "Southwest Coilour" route is the easiest way up the Middle Teton, but it's class 3-4 climbing, which means it is exposed to extreme wind and height. A slip could mean serious injury or even death, and using hands to balance is required

This is a screenshot from Google Earth with The Grand Teton and Jackson Hole in the background.

Perhaps the most interesting piece of Teton trivia is something called The Enclosure. Shortly after the Civil War ended, a pair of climbers attempting to be the first to summit the Grand Teton became the first Europeans to set their eyes on The Enclosure. Just 500 feet short of the highest point in the range, and the highest point that does not require a rope and harness, The Enclosure is a small peak with a bizarre man-made ring of dark granite that had to be hauled many hundreds of feet up the mountain. The spot might have been made when humans first populated the area 10,000 years ago, and maintained by future generations. Some speculate that it was a spot of meditation, or a destination on a “vision quest,” a dreamlike right-of-passage on the way to adulthood. Anyway, The Enclosure highlights the spirituality and ancient history of mountaineering in the Tetons.

I’ve climbed mountains before and I know how brutal it can be. After my best friends and I climbed Mt. Tam while visiting San Francisco, I discovered that we had climbed 1,200 feet (albeit in two sections), which was easy for us. But the 3,000 foot climb from the Bear Lake Trailhead in Rocky Mountain National Park, to the summit of Hallett Peak was horrid. My girlfriend and I could barely stand up afterwards, and we were sore for a week, and that was only half the height of the Middle Teton. With my knee, I might not be able to summit.

The first rooftop picture I ever took, soon after buying my first "real" camera while visiting Chicago for the first time. A horrible picture. It was before my first time "urban exploring," which happened to be the purpose of my second ever trip to Chicago. Now I freakin live in Chicago!

The mountains are on Wells Fargo advertisements, like the ones that adorn the lobby of the Wells Fargo Center, where my once-lawyer-for-the-Vikings step-father had an office nearly 800 feet above the ground. My memories of being taken there as a kid surely played some role in my eventual fondness for photographing lofty places: The roof of the Wells Fargo Building was actually the first roof I ever took a camera on, only a few months before being introduced to the hobby of urban exploring. (Since I didn’t know how to adjust the settings of my camera at the time, my pictures turned out to have such poor resolution that they appear pixilated if they’re any bigger than a small postcard.) The Tetons are easy to fall in love with. Anyway, I started looking for the tallest mountain that didn’t require a rope and harness, and found the Middle Teton.

A picture of a climber inside The Enclosure. The picture was taken by either Monty, Jake or Amy, from the journal linked here. (I'm just crediting the photographer.)

the Location of The Enclosure on the side of the Grand Teton. If you look closely, you can see the summit of the Middle Teton and the Southwest Couloir route on the bottom right side of the photo. Picture by Tristan Geszko, an aerial photographer.