Grand Teton National Park Day 1: Hiking to Hidden Falls & Inspiration Point

All right we are about to enter our 17th national park Grand Tetons. And our first stop is the visitor center. This is probably the nicest and like coolest and maybe the newest one. I don't know it's just really nice of all the visitor centers we've seen in the national parks. Yeah there's awesome view they have tons of cool displays a bunch of like statue animals to prep us for the real animals we might see. Video screens on the floor. It's like a river on the floor. It's really neat. Yeah. All right we are Grand Teton ready. We got our customary park patch and then we've got some postcards for the fam. So we like to collect patches at every national park we go to. Traditionally they've just been kind of sitting in this like box of memories we have but we have this like photo grid in the van and we're going to clip up the patches as we travel so we can see all the places we've been. So we're extra excited to get patches now. Okay one of the coolest things just happened to us. We were just at the visitor center and someone came up from behind us like hey are you adventures of A plus K? And of course we're like yes we were so excited. So Nikki and Dalton thank you guys so much for coming to say hi. Yeah and if you see us out in the wild don't be afraid we're not going to bite you and say hi. The only thing we'll do is we might be like way too excited and scare you off but yeah it's just like the coolest feeling when we get to meet people that follow our adventures that we know from online in real life because that's like what it's all about making connections and meeting new people. Yeah. So we're getting a very late start this morning it is 11 a.m. We had originally planned to get up for sunrise and get into the park to beat the crowds because it's Labor Day weekend but to be honest we really just wanted to sleep. Yeah this uh we got we slept in a little bit and it was totally worth it for me like we've been driving six to eight hours a day the last three days to get up here which is what we wanted to do. We wanted to get out of Texas and get to see this awesome stuff that Tetons are right in front of us. We're in line to get in the park but yeah it is kind of rough uh you know waiting this late in the day but yeah we're hoping the parking situation's not too bad. We have you know the whole week here so if not we can always come back and do other stuff but we just don't want to get burnt out right away by like doing things just doing too much in a day so we typically like to cram our days with a ton of stuff when we're like on vacation but we're not on vacation anymore like this is our life now so we just need to be mindful of how much we're doing in a day so we don't get too tired don't get burnt out because we want to enjoy every second of this and we don't want to be just too tired and grumpy to actually enjoy what we're doing. Yeah you can't go like you can't burn the candle on both ends like they say every single day get the sunrise and the sunset every day so it's just too hard when you have to go find a spot to to sleep at night and then set up and then get ready for bed just and you're going to bed at midnight and getting up in five hours and stuff like that so it's just yeah there's some days you just gotta go a little slower so so the moral of our story is we slept in and we're super happy about it and we plan to try to do less than a day and so if these vlogs don't seem as jam-packed as maybe like our italy vlogs and hawaii that's because we're trying to kind of spread out the activity so we don't get too tired so we're going to try to do still do fun stuff as much as we can but it may just not be as jam-packed but it should still be really awesome for sure we're in if you love to visit national parks we recommend the america the beautiful pass it's 80 a year and it gets you unlimited access to all the national parks as well as like national forests and like federal lands so we use this pass to park at the snowy range scenic byway yesterday in wyoming and we used it today so for us it's i mean it's paid for itself like two or three times already this year so it's awesome and usually or sometimes the national parks have a line just for people at the pass to kind of get them through quicker this one didn't unfortunately but it still went pretty fast all right we are finally on a trail and ready to explore so grand teton national park is the eighth most visited national park in the u.s it gets about 3.5 million visitors a year its neighbor to the north yellowstone national park gets about 4.1 million visitors a year so not everyone's going to both but so far we're loving it here similar to yesterday we just love wyoming it's absolutely beautiful even more beautiful than we could have imagined i keep wanting to be like it shouldn't be called wyoming it should be wow-oming such a bad joke cheesy so we are at jenny lake and we are on the jenny lake trail right yeah yeah and so you can go around the lake which is what we're doing to get to the hidden falls trail hidden falls and inspiration point yeah that's where we're headed so you can go around the lake which is what we're doing or you can take a little ferry that takes you across the jenny lake which would be cool but it's 18 bucks a person uh round trip but we're trying to be a little budget conscious today yeah here we can walk it's a beautiful day two legs yeah it's ten dollars round or sorry ten dollars one way yeah for an adult so if you want to just take it on the way back you can too we'll see how we feel but i think we're just gonna walk this one but the boat ride is probably beautiful so besides water the most important thing you need to have at the grand tetons is bear spray and that's just in case you come in contact with a bear you can hopefully scare it away you got to be bear aware so we haven't been lucky enough to see any major wildlife i don't know it's i guess you'd be lucky if you saw a bear maybe from a car we want to see it from a safe distance from like way over there yeah we went to banff last summer and didn't see any bears on nothing usually people see them so we were really bummed yeah we've seen uh elk in olympic national uh park yeah but other than that that's our that's our major thing so we'd love to a bear and then anything else that's oh bison that's the other one yes i'm really high on my list so cross your fingers for us if we see something on this trip but that it's in a very safe situation where we do not feel threatened yeah we made it to hidden falls but it's not so hidden hidden falls is definitely not a hidden secret there were a lot of people but it was really really pretty we hear that this part of the park is probably the busiest part of the park so we were expecting lots of crowds anyway but now we're headed to inspiration point which is 0.5 miles from hidden falls one thing to note is like the normal trail to hidden falls is closed so you have to take this other trail and apparently it's a bit longer it's about six miles round trip from the jenny lake visitor center we made it to inspiration point do you feel inspired very inspired lots of stuff cooking up here we ate some lunch we soaked up the view and we're headed back down now look at this sick view so from inspiration point you can keep going to cascade canyon we saw signs one said 0.5 mile one said a mile so it's not too bad either way but we are saving our energy up for tomorrow because we have a doozy of a hike on deck so today's taken an interesting turn so when we were on our hike earlier we had overheard someone say something about a fire in jackson and i think they said like a condo or something so we thought there was a condo on fire which is horrible in itself but then we got this like alert on our phone that said like maybe like condo names or like like neighborhood subdivision names and it said like evacuate now and we were like oh god like what's going on and so we kind of just forgot about it and then we were driving into jackson to get groceries and yeah it's like a whole mountain on fire yeah i wasn't we i wasn't expecting to see be able to see it you know and then we're driving in like you can see more and more of the smoke and yeah and then we're just about to get into town and you see the helicopter like swooping around and it like dips down to like scoop up some water with the bucket the huge bucket that it has and then we keep driving we come around the mountain you can really see the flames the flames and if you look really close you can see like firefighters up there yeah it is crazy i mean the condo fire alone would have been horrible but this is like a whole mountain on fire and it's really close to town like the mountain's like on the edge of town it looks like they've gotten a lot of it out yeah there's a lot of things that look burnt but they're out so i'm hopeful they can keep getting it out i think you see a plane right now swooping i don't know if they're gonna drop something or not but yeah it's just like weird to see because i mean in washington we got a lot of wildfires but we've never seen them up close and yeah it's just sad we just hope that everyone's okay and you know obviously things can be replaced but we still hope people's houses and condos are okay and we have no idea how it started but yeah we're gonna keep our eyes on it because we're staying quite a bit aways from jackson but things can spread so yeah that's just an interesting turn for the day so a couple of updates first we just walked out of the grocery store we have a view of the mountain that was on fire and things are looking significantly better so that was really good to come out to i don't think we were in there that long they must have just gotten a lot of work done fast so yeah it looks so much better i mean it's not out yet but it looks better so we just wanted to give you guys an update because it kind of was just a crazy thing to see today yeah but speaking of this grocery store it's called jackson's whole grocer and man it's like my kind of store they have like a lot of grass-fed beef stuff and i like that kind of stuff but uh it was just kind of like a jackson's version yeah jackson's version of whole foods and it was a lot of good tempting stuff in there yeah we probably spent too much money we have to go to another grocery store to find a few things that they didn't have there they had or what they had was maybe too expensive so i don't know but it was a really nice grocery store and we really like nice grocery stores so if you're visiting the area and you need food for like your condo or for camping come here it's awesome they have like a lot of like specific stuff that's made around here so get yourself a treat there so yeah some local goods so we wanted to do another hike today called taggart lake but with our late start our extended grocery store shopping and uh all the traffic with the fire we just kind of ran out of time today yeah we didn't want to rush it and we did an awesome hike today so the hike we did today to hidden falls and inspiration point was beautiful we got to take a diverse range of scenery from like waterfalls to lake to the mountains so if you come to grand teton national park we recommend that trail for sure it's also good for all ages like we saw people oh yeah wide range of ages yeah people carrying babies everyone all ages were there so it's a great hike i mean it's not like walk in the park it has an incline but it wasn't that bad so it's awesome so that's okay we might get to taggart lake later on in the week yeah so our plan b for tonight was to pull off on one of these uh rest stops here that overlook not rest stop but overlook that looks at the teetons for sunset so not too bad of a plan b huh bad we're gonna make dinner and enjoy the view yeah this is the life this is our first official hashtag van life uh meal we got awesome view out the back it's actually our one year of like actually planning uh to buy a van and build it out and everything so a year ago today we were like hey let's do it let's get a van and and do it so this is awesome to finally see it like come to life solid first day grand teton gonna check this one off the list but we have some fun stuff planned tomorrow and we cannot wait to show you where we're going assuming that does not kick our butts on oh i spotted a wild animal they have a pink shirt on it's me it's a wild it's a wild catherine up close and personal