Grand Teton

Grand Teton towers over Jackson Hole in the Rocky Mountains, above a landscape used by Indigenous people for thousands of years. Summer visitors gathered berries and edible bulbs, fished, and hunted; when winter approached, people followed game toward lower country. The peak and its surrounding valleys belonged to this seasonal geography long before commercial trappers arrived.

During the early nineteenth century, beaver drew mountain men into Jackson Hole and the waterways around the Teton Range. David Jackson became closely associated with the valley, which William Sublette called Davey Jackson's Hole in 1829. John Colter may have passed through the region in the winter of 1807–1808 after leaving the Lewis and Clark expedition, although no written account establishes his route. These visits mark the growing presence of the fur trade beneath the great mountain; they do not establish the first human exploration of its slopes.