3 Unexpected Adjustments to Vanlife: From a Few Incredible Days in Grand Teton National Park
#1: You Never Know What You’ll See Outside Your Window
I’m starting to wrap things up in Grand Teton, and I decided to sleep in the same pull-out just outside the east side of the park that I’ve slept at twice while I’ve been here (on non-consecutive days), but the other two times I’ve used this spot it was long after dark when I pulled up. Today, I got here really early because I figured I could do some writing here as well as anywhere, and it would be nice to have already parked when I decide I’m ready to hit the hay, as opposed to having to drive to a decent parking place after ten p.m. like I have been.
But guys — I just looked out the window because I heard car doors slamming and figured there were tourists outside taking pictures of the sign, so I just thought I’d take a peek, watch the goofy or cutesy posing, have a short break from working, you know — a vague attempt at procrastination. Turn’s out, it wasn’t tourists.
There’s a bunch of park rangers and police officers just hanging out outside my van.
And as far as I can tell, I’m not doing anything wrong. There’s not a “No Overnight Parking” sign and, even if there were, it’s still light out so the most they could do is warn me not to park here overnight. There’s just something unexpected and totally unnerving about glancing out the window to see a bunch of cops.
So, yeah. I’m just going to work on this blog post, and hope they go away.
This is the pamphlet I’ve been talking about, with the trail list I was searching for sticking out on the right
Guys, I solved the Mystery of the Vanishing Trail List! It was an insert (no page numbers) that slipped off the passenger seat and down between the door and the footwell, where it was quite well hidden.
So it turns out I’m not going insane, which is a huge relief.
Well, not any more insane than I usually am (ba-dum-psh).
So! Trail list in hand, I started to plan out my exploration of the park over the next couple days. I knew I wanted to visit one of the lake beaches, and I wanted to do one bigger hike, and explore some different parts of the park and see what looked like the most popular sights. So I planned out three days that I felt checked all those boxes.
#2: It’s Always Further Than You Think It Is
Day One was exploring Lawrence S. Rockefeller Preserve. I was a little confused, when planning, about which trails were in the Preserve and where the Death Canyon trailhead was in relation to it. So I had this plan to hike around the Preserve for a while and then do the Phelps Lake Overlook hike from the Death Canyon trailhead. Once I got there, though, I realized the Preserve hikes actually went to Phelps Lake, and it was possible to hike to the lake, up to the overlook, and back down to the road. I did some quick math approximations in my head to figure out how long of a hike it would take to do the loop, and I decided it didn’t seem too strenuous, about five miles.
It was eight, and quite steep for a chunk of it.
Phelps lake was stunning, though. So clear that I could see each scale on the fish from the trail twenty feet above the water. A lovely bright blue. A thick, beautiful forest creeping right up to the shoreline. It was an awesome hike, and I was exhausted by the time I got done with it. I’d planned on maybe doing another, shorter hike in the afternoon, but that about did me in, so I retreated back to Colter Bay to take advantage of their WiFi for a couple hours before heading up to my little roadside parking spot outside the park.
The great thing about the loop I did was that I got to see the lake from every angle. I was surprised how much my impression of it changed as I worked my way around the shore and then up the mountain for a bird’s-eye view. Phelps Lake is gorgeous, in a lot of different ways.
The next day, I’d decided to get to the String Lake parking lot early, since it apparently tended to fill up quite quickly, and then hike to a couple of popular sights at nearby Jenny Lake in the morning and enjoy hanging out at the beach in the heat of the afternoon. I’d seen that Hidden Falls and Inspiration Point were both quite close to the Jenny Lake west shore shuttle boat launch, and that was only about two miles from String Lake, so I figured it would be about a four mile hike.
I was wrong, again. It was six and a half, and the section up to Inspiration Point was, again, quite steep.
And guys, I know 6–8 miles really isn’t the most terrible of hikes. I did Mt. Whittney with my parents a little over a decade ago — once you’ve done 22 miles and summited a 14,000 foot mountain in a single day, it really puts things into perspective. But I definitely haven’t been hiking much in recent years, and it’s amazing how out of shape you can get without ever feeling like you’re that out of shape. I’m working on it, but for the moment, four miles uphill and four more back down feels a little like summiting Whittney.
Hidden Falls were impressive. And crowded. Inspiration Point was impressive. And crowded. But honestly, it’s my opinion that there are other views in the park that are just as impressive and much less crowded. I loved the hike from String Lake to Jenny Lake, though. It had it’s ups and downs, but it was sort of rolling along the shoreline, so the exertion was more steady than intense, and the scenery was incredible. Close-up views of the lakes and the river connecting them, lush with greenery and wildflowers.
Left: Hidden Falls near Jenny Lake. Center: Jenny Lake from Inspiration Point. Right: The river from the point where the trails to Inspiration Point and Hidden Falls diverge.
By the time I got back to Danica from this six and a half mile jaunt, though, in conjunction with the hike the day before, I was kind of a mess. Literally limping, and so exhausted that even just walking around to find a spot on the shore to set up my chair and towel sounded like a huge feat.
So I decided to start just by having lunch in my van. I hung out there for a while, until I could walk like a normal human being again and my feet weren’t throbbing anymore, and then I decided to suck it up and hit the beach.
I’m so glad I did. I went for a swim in the lake (cold, but nowhere near Tahoe-cold) and tried to get some of the dirt and sweat off in the water so I could make it another day without paying for a shower. It worked surprisingly well, and I actually felt refreshed and clean going to bed that night. Then I hung out on the beach (which, honestly, is more of a bank on the shore than a beach, dirt instead of sand, lots of plants growing on it, things like that, but still totally enjoyable) and read, wrote, watched kids playing on the water, and laid out in the sun listening to music.
What was great about this was that it wasn’t totally packed. The water was shallow enough that you could practically walk straight across, from one shore to the next, and the lake was big enough that everyone could have their share of it without getting in anyone else’s space. If you’ve been to Tahoe, you know what I’m talking about: watching kids playing in the water is fun, but not when they’re practically in your lap and splashing water all over your towel.
And this brings me back to the posse of cops hanging out outside my van. Good news: they’ve left. Very anticlimactic story, I know. Don’t worry, there’s more fun to come. Coming soon, to a blog post near you: a mad rush to “do” Yellowstone National Park in under 48 hours (and succeeding, if I do say so myself); the Old West through the eyes of Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley, Calamity Jane, and Wild Bill Hickok; and curing loneliness by getting in with the band.
#3: Reliable WiFi is More Difficult to Find Than You’d Think
A quick word on public WiFi and blogging:
I teased, a few weeks ago, that I spent three hours sitting on a curb. I figured I would work it into these other stories somehow, but that didn’t happen, so now we’re going into a whole little tangent about the back side of blogging.
I do this thing where I double post my blogs: once on Medium, so I can participate in their partnership program and earn a little bit of cash based on readers’ interaction with my work, and once on my website — because it’s my website and it seems silly not to post it there. Besides, that’s where I started this blog to begin with. Double besides, I’m hoping to eventually incorporate some sort of monetization there, so then I’ll have two homes on the internet which both pay me for my work.
The problem with double-posting this way is that it means doing all of the formatting and publishing work twice. Medium is really great, it adjusts photo and text blocks automatically in an attractive way and makes uploading photos (or re-starting an upload if the WiFi is shoddy) simple and straightforward. So I usually do that one first, because then I’ve at least got the post ready to go up and have somewhere to direct readers if my website proves more difficult and gets delayed, which happens.
Squarespace is amazing because it allows for a lot of customization. I would not give Squarespace up for anything. It’s allowed me, a girl with very little understanding of computer code, to create a beautiful, customized website that’s exactly what I wanted. However, all that ability to customize also makes things more complicated. The photos and text blocks don’t just automatically fit together in an aesthetically pleasing way. It’s takes a lot of manipulating. And the photo-upload block does this weird thing where it doesn’t work as well once you close the original upload window, so if the photo doesn’t upload fully the first time, you have to completely delete the block and start over.
My first day at Colter Bay, I tried to use their WiFi to upload a blog post. It was slow, though, and I spent an hour just trying to get one photo uploaded before I gave up.
A couple days later, when I found myself back in Jackson after the key incident, I decided to try the library. It was closed for COVID, sure, but there was still a chance the WiFi was turned on.
I lucked out: the WiFi was on, and it was pretty strong, and it was pretty quiet — just me and one other guy with our laptops.
Of course, it worked best closer to the building, so I set up camp on the curb and got to work.
Normally, double-posting a blog post (assuming I’ve already written and edited it and selected and edited the photos) takes about an hour. The problem was, for some reason the library’s WiFi kept cutting out and disconnecting from my laptop. Which was fine for the Medium post. I just waited for it to reconnect after a couple minutes and kept working. But with the post for my website, each time it cut out I had to restart the photo upload from scratch. Which resulted in me sitting on the curb in front of the library for three hours, constantly uploading and reconnecting and re-uploading and pleading with the universe to let it stay connected until the upload finished.
That was probably a bit of an anti-climactic story, but there you have it: the time it took me three hours just to upload one blog post. Four, if you count the hour I spent trying to do it at Colter Bay.
“Why spend three hours on the curb if you only tried for an hour at Colter Bay?” you ask?
Because at least I was making progress. At Colter Bay I spent an hour and couldn’t even get one photo to upload. I realized I could try all night and get nowhere. At the library, it was working, if slowly. I knew I’d finish it eventually if I just kept chipping away at it, and I also knew it was high time I get another post up.
So that’s why I spent three hours sitting on the curb.
I am so excited for COVID to go away, so libraries can open again and I can instead spend three hours sitting in a chair in the climate-controlled peace of bookshelves and easy access to public restrooms. Man, but was I taking libraries for granted. Save the libraries, people, they’re a blessing.
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