It’s a pretty easy drive from Yellowstone to Grand Teton – in fact I’m not sure we realized we were leaving Yellowstone until we saw the mountains peeking out on our right. Once that happened though, we knew that most likely we’ve gotten close to Grand Teton… or that we went the completely wrong way and we’re back in Glacier. Happy accidents either way!

The hikes are plentiful in Grand Teton, but we chose to only stay one full day and hike around Jenny Lake. It’s a relatively easy hike but you can add a few offshoots to overlook the lake, offshoots into the canyons between the mountains, or to small ponds where moose frequently gather. We ended up diverting to Moose Ponds where we did in fact see moose! Aptly named… I would say the rest of the hike was also quite gorgeous, but at this point in our trip we have been bombarded by so much beauty that it’s hard to point out which nature was the most amazing nature in Grand Teton’s nature…

One notable part of this area was that we did NOT want to pay $60 for a tent campsite to just park our van, so we decided to try out some of the dispersed camping spots in the national forest next door. This was a pretty well maintained area for free car/RV camping, and the views were phenomenal in some of the locations – given how late we arrived, our location was not as prime as it could be, but a grilled cheese looks good wherever you cook it.

After we woke up the next day, it was time to get on the road to South Dakota where we planned to visit Mt. Rushmore and Badlands before we wrapped up the northern national park trip and started heading down into the heartland of America – Arkansas. Much to our surprise, Wyoming chose self-immolation instead and we ended up driving ~50 miles through the lightning induced wildfire starting to consume Teton National Forest. Luckily it seems this fire hasn’t harmed anyone yet, but by the look of the roadsides containment won’t be easy…

Mt. Rushmore later that day was relatively straight forward – imagine a few heads carved on the side of a mountain (focused on notable US presidents to exclude Stone Mountain & Crazy Horse) and you probably have enough of an idea of what the monument looks like. Regardless, it was interesting to see the history behind the formation of the monument and the challenges that ultimately led to a less complete (but still impressive) national monument. Easy 1 hour stop, 2 if you really want the buffalo burger…

Afterwards we got on the road again to drive to Badlands National Park, one of the parks that is definitely on the ‘better driven through’ list of parks. The park area itself is massive (not an enormous park area, but a weird gerrymandered tract of land that wouldn’t survive a SCOTUS review), so driving from vista to vista is the only realistic way to see the many unique peaks formed by the multi-million year erosion event. Overall a gorgeous drive (even the buffalo stop to gander), but it only took a few hours before we felt we had seen enough bad lands. Next stop – Arkansas!