August 12, 2016

I picked up my dirty, window-chipped, soccer mom Toyota from National yesterday morning and began my Grand Teton adventure. My first stop was the National Museum of Wildlife Art. It's built into a butte about three miles north of Jackson's town square and it overlooks the National Elk Refuge. As I pulled into the parking lot I noticed a yoga class on the walk outside the museum. How fucking pretentious is it to do yoga outside a museum overlooking the National Elk Refuge? Is yoga with a view the new yoga? Isn't yoga supposed to be an introspective experience and not a "guess-where-I-did-yoga-this-morning-in-my-new-outfit" bragging opportunity? Barf.

The Tetons will torture you if you let them: every mile and every bend in US Rte. 93 gives you a new perspective, and therefore another desire to photograph them. I took about 50 pictures - zoomed in, zoomed out, landscape, portrait, with lakes and trees, and just the peaks. Only six to nine of the photos will end up in an album, and it will odious to cull them. I encountered a fox on Jenny Lake Road, but it disappeared into the woods too quickly for me to photograph it through the open car window.

I took the tram at the Jackson Hole ski resort for the view of the valley with my back to the Tetons. It was 72 degrees at the base and 52 degrees 4,000 feet higher at the summit. Since I was wearing a dress, and therefore under-dressed, I declined to get out of the tram and wait 15 minutes for the next one. I FaceTimed Jean on the way down. Corbet's Couloir is to the right of the first tower on the descent. It's a vertical run that is crazy when snow-packed, and seeing the boulders which compose it make it even less inviting (if that is possible). Skiing from the top of the tram is for experts only. Actually, 60% of all the trails at Jackson Hole are for experts only. I overheard a woman on the tram remarking that Jackson Hole has a very low return rate because of its difficulty. I'm thinking that if you factored out the people who died skiing off cliffs the return rate might be dramatically higher.

I bought a ridiculous amount of wine today because I'm going to Utah on Sunday and I'll be there for a week. Utah is the land of "don't drink, don't smoke, what do you do?" funny underwear people. I haven't been there for almost 20 years. I hear it's easier to buy booze these days, particularly in Park City, but I'm not willing to take the risk. The one time I skied in Utah was Christmas 1997, and the ski base was 29" everywhere - about a third of what it should have been. I skied Park City, Deer Valley (for 1 hour), Alta, Snowbird, and Sundance. The last was my favorite because it was like a private resort with real people and great food.

​I love Utah for Sundance and Little Cottonwood Canyon, Matt Parker and Trey Stone. I was a "South Park" fan from the "Jesus v. Santa" pilot, and I watched it for years. I wish I had seen "The Book of Mormon" on Broadway. It's probably easier to make fun of a relatively new religion, and Joseph Smith's tablets are fairly easy fodder. The truth is that all religion was founded by some guy approaching a group of people and telling them a remarkable story he claimed to have experienced (which he really made up). He was probably also controlling the food and water supply, too.