July | 2018 | 2sparrows

Day 7 we awoke in Jackson and had a leisurely morning, before heading back into the park for Cascade Canyon. This was the busiest place we had been — some of that was due to nicer weather, but some of it was due to the popularity of this hike! We made it a little over 5 miles, to just before the Canyon forks north and south. We again had a hot lunch and chilled for a bit, before heading back down. This hike gave us a little over 50 miles of hiking and backpacking!

For dinner, we spoke to the hotel receptionist about some options, and decided on The Lift, a 15 minute walk towards the town ski slopes. I imagine during the winter this place is happening, but at this time a year, it’s away from the down town business, and is more of a locals place. We both had excellent meals.

On the walk over we saw a glass building with all kinds of colorful florescent lighting. Upon closer inspection, we discovered it was an indoor garden, growing all kinds of vegetables on rotating shelves. Pretty cool to see!

The next day we flew home. We will definitely be back to hike the Teton Crest trail some day! But we need to come in very late July or August, for that to be possible.

After a warm night in a hotel, we both got in short runs, and then had great breakfast at the Trapper Grill. We then headed up into Paintbrush Canyon, the canyon we had had permits to camp in the night before. In the parking lot I saw a couple coming out with all the gear and talked to them about conditions they experienced, and it pretty much rained on them all afternoon, evening, and into the night. So we felt justified that we had baled on our backpacking plans!

Paintbrush is a beautiful canyon. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but it would come down to Death or Paintbrush. They were so different. Death definitely felt more remote, and the waterfall up was amazing. Paintbrush had amazing open views of valley lakes.

We hiked up about as far as we could go — large snow field blocked the way. At that point, looking further into the canyon was like looking at winter, but all you had to do was turn around and see spring. We hiked back down a bit to an amazing camp site and set up our chairs, and cooked a hot lunch, and spoke to a few other backpackers that would be staying here this night.

When we got back to town we drove to The Bird, a burger joint about 10 minutes south of Jackson, that one of the local backpackers we had met coming out of Open Canyon had recommended. It had a fun atmosphere and was quite good.