Reading: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Watching: Lakes and mountains and clouds

Moving: hiked ~7 miles

9 September 2002: Leigh Lake

For our last day, we returned to (from upstream to down), Leigh, String, and Jenny Lakes. String Lake is most often a creek connecting the two larger lakes; meadows thrive where the lake has shrunk.

I think String Lake was the Teton equivalent of RMNP's Bear Lake: very pretty from right off the very big parking lot.

Running water over stone and tree was just right. Plus I really liked the determination of the two little trees growing from rocks right in the middle of the current. The jagged peak of Grand Teton would catch and tear clouds as they passed over the moutains.

In time we arrived at Leigh Lake, a shallow reflecting pool for the mountains on the west side. We walked about halfway up the lake and then stopped. We sat and breathed and looked for about an hour, quietly enough to hear a fox bark, to watch two Clark's nuthatches bathe (quite clumsily--one kept falling in), to see the clouds catch on the east and west horns of Mt. Moran. These I called the mountain's fangs, and the glacier between them its tongue.

Before leaving, we returned to Jenny Lake for a swim. I was apprehensive about just what two days of rain might have done to the temperature, but really it was fine. It felt the warmest of all the days we'd swum, as a matter of fact. But maybe it was my curse of pre-nostalgia during my last swim.

And on our way out, I spotted a bear. Why does a bear cross the road? This was a Newfoundland-sized, chocolate-brown black bear, very glossy. Someone must have put egg in its bear chow.

(That "of" is part of the University of Connecticut sticker on Cassidy--the car we bought five years after I graduated from UConn for the second time, nostalgia indeed. I mention this only because our camping neighbor asked if we were both professors. I would dearly love to know if he, from Alabama, asked only because of the university sticker, though he already knew we lived in Denver not Connecticut, or because we read around our campfire and spoke in grammatically correct sentences.)