The Tetons Are Falling!!! (relative to the valley)

Big news is circulating since last Friday’s announcement that Jackson Hole is slowly becoming, well, less of a hole. A seventeen year study using global positioning system satellites to measure the slightest movement of the land found the valley rose 1.7 inches. I was concerned about becoming an alarmist, but this could have implications for the Teton Science Schools. What if the valley rose so high the Tetons completely disappeared? Should we be entering into strategic organizational planning to prepare for a loss-of-namesake contingency plan?

My rusty math skills quickly quieted my racing heart. All other rational geologic thought and processes aside, it would take 843,373.5 years for the valley floor to rise up and meet the highest of the teton peaks. It amazes me that the crust of the earth- something I know to be extremely hard and un-moving from personal experiences such as being reacquainted with it while skiing at Snowking or attempting to dig a hole in the cobble ridden sage flats- can be so incredibly plastic. There is a force at work here, though, that surpasses the strength of even the unruliest cowboys left in Jackson Hole, the Yellowstone Hotspot.

Unfortunately for the 20 somethings of the valley, this is not the latest National Park concessionaire run discotheque. This is a supervolcano that has carved a path all they way from Washington, Oregon, and California across Nevada and Idaho and eventually into the northwest corner of Wyoming. It now rests underneath the United States’ first National Park, Yellowstone, and provides us with such spectacles as Old Faithful, Grand Prismatic Springs, and ancient columnar basaltic flows.

After all my musings, I decided I better get outside and make sure all was still visibly right with the valley. I summitted Shadow Mountain, which lies just opposite the Teton Range on the Gros Ventre side of the valley, with Jaime and our cross-country skis. We surveyed the scene and decided that from 1,500 feet above the valley and 58,000 feet from the peak of the Grand it was hard to tell anything was happening. However, even though it is just out of sight in the picture below, the astute observer will realize when gazing at the Teton Range that it abruptly ends to the north and tapers to nothing. The range that once continued well beyond where you can see from here once succumbed to the Yellowstone Hotspot.