The Teton Range has no foothills, and that is the whole of it: a wall of granite spires in northwest Wyoming coming straight out of flat sagebrush, 2,100 metres from the valley floor to the top. Most mountains arrive gradually, through a swell of hills. This one is a single move, and from the valley you take it in whole. The range is also still going up. A fault runs along its foot, slipping about a millimetre a year; each earthquake drops the valley a little and lifts the peaks a little more — the reason the front is so sharp. French trappers who counted three summits from the Idaho side called them les trois tétons, and the name stuck. The Shoshone, whose homeland this is, knew the range as Teewinot — many pinnacles — and one of the sharpest peaks still carries it.
Dawn belongs to the river. Where the Snake bends at Oxbow Bend, and on the gravel at Schwabacher Landing, the water lies flat enough to hold the whole range upside down, until the first breeze finds it. Down the valley the homestead barns of Mormon Row stand small and human under the granite, catching the warm light while the peaks are still dark. Elk and bison graze the open flats at either end of the day, and moose step out of the willow thickets along the river. Jenny Lake sits at the foot of the peaks, glacier-fed and cold, and the path along its shore puts you looking straight up Cascade Canyon into the middle of the range. A shuttle boat takes you across to the far side, where a trail climbs to Hidden Falls and Inspiration Point. In late September the aspens along the shore go gold against the grey spires. Ansel Adams photographed this wall above the Snake in 1942, and that picture rides aboard Voyager, out past the planets. He took it from the same flat ground you can stand on.