Jackson Hole - Horseback Riding and a Chuckwagon Dinner

Our fifth day in Jackson Hole was spent with horses.  Specifically, horseback riding in the morning, and a chuckwagon dinner (drawn by horses of course!) at night!  I was soooo excited about both of these activities.  We decided to head back to Teton Village for the horseback riding, with Teton Village Trail Rides.  They have 1, 2 and 4 hour rides available - we thought 1 was too short (by the time you start...it's time to stop!) and 4 was obviously too long, so we decided to go with the 2 hour ride.  Poor husband's bad back would not allow him to ride a bouncing horse for 2 hours, so he stayed back at the house that morning to rest up.

We all hopped on our respective horses and headed out and into the woods.

The trail took us up the side of a hill, through the woods, and down through a field.  The guides were great, and it was so nice to ride through all the beautiful nature all morning!

Once we got back to the stables, we hopped off our horses, said thanks for a great ride, and headed back to the cabin to get husband and get cleaned up.  Then we headed into town to play a little putt putt...one of the staples of any Colbert vacation.  The Snow King Resort has a lot of fun little things to do, like putt putt, an alpine slide, and bouncy jump things - great afternoon fillers.  Their putt putt course is no frills, but interesting and fun!

Then we made our way toward our evening plans, and to one of the things I was most excited about on our trip - a chuckwagon dinner!   Our tour was through the Bar-T-5 ranch.  The entire evening was so fantastic - extremely organized, friendly staffers, delicious food, and a cute show.

I'll admit, when we were waiting for the start of the evening, I saw all the other people that were there to participate with us and thought it was going to be a disaster.  Howww would they get 75-100 people on these chuckwagons and to dinner in a timely manor?  Would we all have to sit on different wagons?  Thankfully, Bar-T-5 has this down to a science, and every group is assigned a wagon (A, B, C...) and a dinner table (1, 2, 3...) when they come in.  We were happy to see our assignment as A1 - sounded promising to me!

After a brief intro from the owner, everyone loaded the wagons and we took off for dinner.  The ride brought us into Cache Creek Canyon, where we were "attacked" by Indians screaming by the chuckwagons on horses.  They came riding out of the woods RIGHT behind us and scared the bejesus out of me.  :)

Once we got to their camp, we unloaded, found our tables, the dinner bell was rung, and we dug in.  We were at lucky table number 1 and went first (whoop!).  Dinner was all you can eat and SO good - BBQ chicken, roast beef with gravy, corn on the cob, (yummy) baked beans, salad, and rolls.  While we ate, they put on a show - a mixture of a (family friendly) comedy routine and music from their house band.

Annnnnd on the way home, we found another moose!  This guy was hangin' out, eatin' some reeds by a pond.  What a life.  :)

Check out some of the other things we did on vacation:

Hiking Jenny Lake & Colter Bay
Yellowstone National Park
Float Trip down the Snake River
Hiking Rendezvous Mountain

Hiking Rendezvous Mountain

Wednesday of our vacation, we decided to take another hike.  (We needed a few days after our Jenny Lake hike to rest up.)  This time, we set our sights on Rendezvous Mountain, a 10,927 foot mountain in the Teton range.  This is one of the more traveled mountains, especially in the winter by the ski crowd!

Teton Village is at the bottom of the mountain, and has lots of shops and fun things to do, like horseback riding, tours, mountain bike trails, and their giant tram that takes you to the summit.  We decided to take the tram to the top of the mountain and hike around up there.

The tram takes about 12 minutes to arrive at the top of Rendezvous.  They say you'll see animals on the mountain as you ride up from time to time, but we didn't.  (I was actually pretty happy about that, since the plan was the HIKE around the area we were viewing.)  When you finally get to the top, you're rewarded with stunning 360 degree views.

We decided that we'd give the Rock Springs Loop Trail a try, a 5 mile hike that eventually connected to the Summit Trail and led us to a gondola that would take us back down the mountain.

Our first little stop was at a snow patch.  Nothing like playing in the snow in August!  We may have had a little too much fun...

Once we'd had our fill of snow, we made our way back to the main trail and continued on down the mountain.  It was at this point that we stopped seeing many other people.  Seems like most people go to the snow and turn back around to head to the top (taking the tram back down the mountain).  As we continued, the grade got even more steep and rocky.  The views were beautiful though!

At one point, we completely lost the trail.  It was like it just stopped.  Thankfully, we could see a trail sign across the way, so we made our own path across a gorge and hopped back on it.  The trail weaved us down about 1,000 feet through dense wooded areas, beautiful meadows, and down rocky cliffs.

We finally reached the Summit Trail, which we followed back up about 500 feet to the gondola.  The summit trail was actually an access road, so I'm really glad we didn't decide to take that one the entire way.  While the views were nice, there wasn't much else to it.  It WAS the most exhausting part of the hike though - there was an enormous hill leading back to the gondola which almost killed us.  Mom took to making her own switchbacks on the trial - she's so smart.  :)

It was definitely a beautiful hike, but was not easy.  The information center called it moderate with some difficult sections, which I'd believe.  If you do this loop, make sure you bring your bear spray.  There was about an hour period where we didn't see anyone else (so there wasn't regular 'traffic' keeping animals away), and saw several recent signs of bears while we made our way through the deep woods.  Thankfully, we didn't run into one, but we were glad to have the bear spray just in case!

Check out the rest of our trip here:
Hiking Jenny Lake and Colter Bay
Yellowstone National Park
Float Trip down the Snake River