Death Canyon and Static Peak Divide

Top of Static Peak Pass (10, 790 feet)

Phelps Lake (7200 feet)


Static Peak Divide (if you couldn't read that)

Luke looking at some sort of fire. I still haven't figured out if it's a forest fire or something else...
Overlooking Phelps Lake

Autumn, have you arrived?

Death Canyon

Yesterday I had the day off and decided to go down to the Tetons to do some hiking. I don't know a lot of hikes down there, so I asked around the workplace and found that Death Canyon was supposed to be a pretty tough one. Needless to say, that's what I did. Luke, a co-worker from Canyon, also had the day off, so he met me down here at Grant early in the morning. We drove down to find Death Canyon not knowing much about it, other than we could hit up Static Peak Divide once we reached the ranger station located at the end of the Death Canyon trail. Were we rather under prepared as far looking at a map is concerned? Yes. But, we figured we could stay on the trail, and as long as we got back to the car by dark, we'd be a-ok. We were (otherwise I wouldn't be writing this...).

It is a 3.7 mile hike to the end of the Death Canyon trail, and then 3.7 back, obviously. I'd heard this hike was quite strenous, as I mentioned above, but I was surprised with the difficulty. It definitely wasn't a strenuous hike as all the websites I'd seen had ranked it. You start with a nice view over Phelps Lake before you head down into the Canyon to start coming back out. My photos probably do a poor job at portraying the beauty of the color changes of the trees and plants on the sides of the trails, but I did my best.

We reached the ranger station in 1 hour and 23 minutes, which was decent time, I thought. We figured we'd hike hard, to make sure we could at least attempt to get to Static Peak. Since we ended up not starting until 11:45am, we didn't know if we'd have enough time to make it that far. We packed our headlamps just in case it was after dark on the way back down. The ranger station had a sign next to it that said the divide was only 4 miles away, so we were feeling good about our chances to make it. What we didn't know was that it was 4 miles up hill, the entire way. Nothing like a little challenge, right?

It was a nice workout to get up the side of the mountain, and very challenging to say the least. We kept a decent pace for most of the way up. Once we had reached tree line it was getting a little tough to stay focused on getting to the pass because it felt like it was going on forever (kind of like my run-on sentences. Sorry to all the teachers in the family for that one!). At one point, right after realizing we were past the tree line, we stopped to overlook Phelps Lake again, and we were actually higher than the planes that were flying into the Jackson, Wyoming airport. We could see all of them below us flying in to land on the runway. That was a neat view.

Long story short, we made it to Static Peak Divide in just over 3 hours and made it back down in 2 hours and 45 minutes. The trail guides had said it would be a 10 hour hike, so we definitely made good time. It ended up being about 17.4 miles round trip because we parked 1 mile away from the actual trailhead. So, that comes out to just under 20 minutes per mile. Not bad considering most of the trail wasn't even on flat ground. I'd like to go back again and get to the stop of Static Peak which is over 11,000 feet. I think that'd be a great view from the top. The strenous rating I would say applied much more to the Static Peak Divide than the Death Canyon. The views and experience were definitley worth the struggle to get up the mountian/canyon.

Sorry this is a bit of short description of a great day of hiking, but as I've preached all season, the internet here is shaky, so I want to get this posted before something happens and I have to wait another week!

On a side note: I have to say, it seems like the Chiefs did well last week, but now they're trailing Cleveland at half time. They better get this figured out, because when I get back to having cable, I need to at least be in good spirits while watching them.

KU? Well, I don't think I'm going to talk about them. I do have a joke though!

Question: How many batteries does it take to beat KU's football team?

Answer: 1 double A. (A little crack at the loss to North Dakota State... and you might as well

throw Southern Miss into that mix as well...)

On another side note: The beard is making a comeback. Since my move down here to Grant the managers are less strict apparently on enforcing the "no beard rule". Thanks to the managers that I'll only know for two weeks, you have allowed me to continue to scare the ladies off with my mountain man apperance. I do appreciate it!

Until next time...