Teton Park Road: Jackson to Moran
Up the valley under the Tetons: Bill Menor's ferry and Maud Noble's chapel at Moose, the lake named for a Newe woman, and the dam that made Jackson Lake a reservoir for Idaho.
The Route at a Glance
How the valley floor came into the park is told at Jackson Hole & the Tetons. This is the inside road up it, about thirty-seven miles from the town of Jackson to Moran. The highway runs north from town for twelve miles to Moose, where the Teton Park Road leaves it, crosses the Snake, and runs up the west side of the valley at the foot of the range for twenty miles to Jackson Lake Junction. The last four miles follow the river east past Oxbow Bend to Moran.
Just inside the Moose entrance, a side road leads to Menor's Ferry. Bill Menor homesteaded here beside the Snake in 1894 and built a ferry that year to carry wagons across; his cabin and store still stand. Maud Noble bought him out in 1918, and in 1925 the Chapel of the Transfiguration went up on land she gave, built so that its window frames the highest peaks of the range.
Jenny Lake, halfway up, is named for Jenny Leigh, a Newe woman of Washakie's band, born in 1849. Her husband, the English trapper Richard Leigh, called Beaver Dick, gave his name to Leigh Lake just north. The two guided the Hayden survey of 1872, which named both lakes for them, and Jenny shared what she knew of the country with its men. Her Shoshone name was never written down. In December 1876 she and all of her children died of smallpox at their home on the Idaho side of the range.
Past Jenny Lake a paved spur climbs Signal Mountain for a view of the whole valley, and the road comes down to Jackson Lake at the dam. The lake is natural, but the Reclamation Service dammed its outlet to store water for farms along the Snake in Idaho. A log-crib dam of 1906 failed in 1910, and the concrete dam that replaced it went up between 1911 and 1916 under Frank Crowe, who later ran the building of Hoover Dam. The top thirty-three feet of the lake are still Idaho's irrigation water, under rights older than the park.
The Teton Park Road is closed to cars from November 1 through April 30 between the Taggart Lake trailhead and Signal Mountain Lodge, and walkers, cyclists and skiers have it then; the highway on the east side of the valley stays open all year. Entrance stations at Moose and Moran collect the park fee, and there is fuel at Signal Mountain and Jackson Lake Lodge.
The Drive, Stop by Stop
2 stops along the route, in driving order from Jackson, Wyoming to Moran, Wyoming.
- 1
- 2
That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let Teton Park Road: Jackson to Moran do what it does best.
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