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<\/p>\nIf enthusiasm is contagious, then I had full-blown, take-me-to-the-ER symptoms. My best buddy, Andy, stood on a paddleboard in the middle of String Lake, mouth agape. Behind him, the Grand Tetons towered above the lake; below him, fish darted through the shallow, gin-clear water; and above him, the crisp blue, late-summer sky radiated the appreciate-it-while-you-can feel that late-summer days exude.<\/p>\n
\u201cGreg, the fish are everywhere,\u201d he gushed. \u201cLook!\u201d I was looking\u2026at the fish, at the mountains, at Andy, at the hikers on the shoreline trail, at the other paddlers on String Lake. And I loved everything I saw.<\/p>\n
Andy\u2019s bubbly, kid-like joy wasn\u2019t surprising. The setting was absolutely stunning. There\u2019s a reason the Grand Tetons are considered some of, if not the most, scenic mountains in the country. Rising thousands of feet above us, their chiseled peaks dominated the brilliant blue horizon.<\/p>\n
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What was surprising was Andy\u2019s level of stoked; we\u2019d been paddling in Grand Teton National Park for three full days. Three view-filled, easy-camping, perfect-weather days packed with a diversity of super fun paddling. Andy\u2019s continued stoke inspired me to let go of the nagging worries I\u2019d had about how this trip might go. On paper, it seemed easy and chill: Two college buddies catching up over a week of paddling in a national park. But I\u2019ve sandbagged enough friends to second-guess how things look on paper.<\/p>\n
To be fair, Andy lives in Chicago. He doesn\u2019t get Rocky Mountain views that often. I live in Missoula and get them every day. Andy doesn\u2019t paddleboard, while I was deep into writing a paddleboarding guidebook and had practically spent my entire summer on a board. Andy has two young boys and a stressful job. I am not so encumbered, though a busy summer with our foster son had definitely added some new elements of structure to my self-directed lifestyle.<\/p>\n
So here we were: The amateur flatlander who had done more paddleboarding in the last three days than throughout his 40-year existence and the grizzled, mountain-town semi-pro who\u2019d chalked up hundreds of hours on a board in the last few months. Both super stoked, super grateful and loving every minute of it.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\nGrand Teton can do that to you. Spread across 310,000 acres of Wyoming, \u201cGTNP\u201d serves up iconic views, 1,000 front-country campsites, 200 miles of trails, and an efficient road system that makes it all accessible and easy to navigate. The Teton Mountains, which seem to explode from the sagebrush-meets-conifer-forest flood plain through which the Snake River flows, dominates the park.<\/p>\n
When mountain-minded folks look at a map of Grand Teton National Park, they see iconic mountaineering test pieces and epic backpacking opportunities. When water rats study the same map, they see a lake- and river-packed landscape begging for a paddle. I enjoy a good backpack (mountaineering isn\u2019t really my bag, though I\u2019d love to climb a big, technical peak someday), but as a water rat, the blue spaces on the map pulled at me. When I proposed a week-long, front-country (read car-camping) trip focused on paddling GTNP\u2019s waters, Andy was all in. Even though he hadn\u2019t really paddleboarded\u2014ever.<\/p>\n
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I knew the paddling wouldn\u2019t be super technical, but I wanted him to have at least a few sessions on a board before we paddled for a week straight. Although Andy is athletic and has loads of camping experience, I worried that muscles used for paddling and not much else would get sore after the first long day. I worried about his feet cramping up or that the old injuries we all have after 40 years of living would reemerge. I immediately started hounding him to get some on-the-water experience before we met for seven days of paddling.<\/p>\n
Grand Teton was part of the guidebook I was writing, and I needed a reliable partner along for the research and photos. I pigeonholed the focus of the trip on paddling to such an extreme measure, that when he asked if there would be any time for hiking, I didn\u2019t even consider it. I gave him a hard no. This was a paddling trip.<\/p>\n
He ended up taking one 1-hour lesson.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\nWe warmed up on our first full day in the park with a paddle on Two Ocean Lake, an out-of-the-way lake in the park\u2019s far eastern corner. The wind picked up as we paddled out, and Andy was obviously a bit nervous and shaky on the board. But he settled in, and we caught a fun downwind ride back to shore after paddling for of couple hours. Though it was Labor Day, we saw only two kayakers in this quiet corner of the park. We didn\u2019t see many mountains either. Two Ocean sits below forested ridges that hide most of the Tetons (a few pocket views opened up when we got to the lake\u2019s midpoint), but we did see a few leeches on our feet as we walked back to the car!<\/p>\n
We spent the next two days pushing Andy\u2019s limits on the Snake River. The first day, we paddled 15 miles, from Jackson Dam to Deadman\u2019s Reach. We decided that I would hitch from the takeout back to the put-in before we launched. I caught a ride after about 30 minutes of waiting and met back up with Andy just below Jackson Dam, giving him plenty of time to read the aggressive National Park signs warning paddlers of the downstream hazards to life and limb.<\/p>\n
As it turned out, the first few miles proved mellower than the wind-whipped Two Ocean Lake trip the prior day. The last ten miles served up mellow riffles and mind-blowing views of the Tetons. Andy enjoyed some of the best Type 2 fun he\u2019d had in a while and built up his confidence. I ate up a few gigabytes of memory on my camera trying to capture it all.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\nThe next day, we paddled another ten miles of the Snake, from Deadman\u2019s Reach to Moose, Wyoming. Although it\u2019s considered one of the most difficult stretches of water in the park (more NPS signs!), Andy crushed it. Later, over campfire beers, he admitted how gripped he felt the whole day, but you couldn\u2019t tell watching him. On the river, I would pull ahead of him in fast water to get some shots, barking orders at this newly minted SUP model: \u201cCan you hug the far shore? Hold there, paddle backward if you have to! Your other left!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo!\u201d he invariably yelled back, nervously laughing but following my every direction and even on-sight reading the bouncy water for hundreds of yards as I fell behind, swapping out lenses and snapping away. Maybe he was aided by the stable and responsive Quiver 9.6\u00a0SUP board<\/a> I\u2019d lent him, but he didn\u2019t even drop to his knees.<\/p>\n That night, I managed to convince him to head to Jenny Lake for a sunset booze cruise. We stuck a couple of beers in cozies and slipped onto the quiet lake as the sun dipped behind the Tetons. A small powerboat cruised the far end of the shore, but we basically had the lake to ourselves. Andy paddled out away from me a bit, now totally comfortable on the still water, and I realized maybe I\u2019d overestimated the potential difficulties of this trip. Andy was paddling proof that if you have reasonable balance, have held a paddle a few times in your life, and are confident enough to give it a try, paddleboarding isn\u2019t that hard.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s how we found ourselves on String Lake with a cobbled-together backcountry camping kit lashed to our boards, en route to a backcountry campsite on Leigh Lake. I\u2019d built a loose itinerary for the trip, cataloging paddles I wanted to do, but not setting a specific schedule. I knew I wanted to paddle String and Leigh Lakes, but the overnight was something of a lark, devised over beers on the third night of the trip.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know, we could hit the ranger station in the morning and see if there\u2019s a backcountry campsite available on Leigh Lake. We can just bring food we don\u2019t have to cook since we don\u2019t have a backpacking stove.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHell yeah, let\u2019s do it. I\u2019m pretty much an expert paddler now. An overnight ain\u2019t nothing to me.\u201d He was joking, but he was right.<\/p>\n That backcountry night was the highlight of our front-country trip. After finding our campsite and setting up the tent, we hiked up Leigh Canyon, following Leigh Creek and game trails peppered with bear scat. We watched the evening light play out on the flanks of Mt. Moran, huge and imposing and close. We ate cold Thai peanut noodles that we\u2019d made the night before and that rivalled any we\u2019d ever had. No one walked past our campsite; no camp host checked in to confirm that we were leaving the next day; no diesel truck rumbled by towing a house on wheels. In the morning, the skies cleared long enough for us to eat hard-boiled eggs and dry out the tent before closing back in again as we paddled back across Leigh, portaged the short walk to String, and then paddled back to the truck in a growing drizzle.<\/p>\n Disinterested in sitting in the rain at our campsite, we hit the John Colter\u2019s Ranch House Restaurant and Bar. The restaurant boasted a western theme, but it felt more like a cowboyed-up Denny\u2019s circa 1997. Our bartender, a tall Bulgarian goth rocker with perfectly coiffed long black hair, served us impeccable cocktails, graciously dealt with his other customers, and spoke highly of the food, all while heavy metal ballads blasted from the speakers. It was an oddly perfect ending to our mini backcountry adventure.<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/d2kl15j267vxtq.cloudfront.net\/duct-tape\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/31162258\/GTNP-2-2-100x100.jpg\")
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