Bridger-Teton National Forest

Bridger-Teton is one of the largest national forests in the lower 48 -- more than three million acres of western Wyoming wrapped around the wild edges of Grand Teton and Yellowstone, from the granite peaks of the Wind River Range to the sagebrush country above Jackson Hole. It's true Greater Yellowstone backcountry: grizzlies, big elk herds, the headwaters of the Green River, and three huge wilderness areas. Cool corner of it -- at the Parting of the Waters, a single creek splits and sends half its water toward the Atlantic and half toward the Pacific.

The place

Bridger-Teton sprawls across more than three million acres of western Wyoming, one of the largest national forests in the lower 48. It wraps around the south and east sides of Grand Teton and Yellowstone as part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem -- one of the last big, mostly-intact wild landscapes left in the country. This is serious high country: glacier-hung granite peaks in the Wind River Range, the sagebrush foothills above Jackson Hole, three vast wilderness areas, and the headwaters of some of the West's great rivers. If you want room to disappear, there's a lot of it here.

History

The forest carries two famous names. 'Bridger' honors Jim Bridger, the legendary mountain man, trapper, and guide who knew this corner of the Rockies as well as anyone in the fur-trade era. 'Teton' comes from the Teton Range, the sawtooth peaks on the forest's western edge. The two halves -- the Bridger National Forest and the Teton National Forest -- were managed separately for decades before being combined into a single Bridger-Teton National Forest in 1973. Long before any of that, this was homeland and hunting ground for the Shoshone, Crow, and other tribes, and the high passes here were part of the routes that first drew trappers and explorers into the northern Rockies.

Wildlife & plants

This is grizzly country -- Bridger-Teton is part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, one of the few places in the lower 48 where grizzlies still roam -- along with black bears, gray wolves, and mountain lions (you'll see far more of their sign than the animals themselves). The valleys and foothills hold some of the largest elk herds in North America, plus moose, mule deer, pronghorn, and bighorn sheep up on the high rock. Trumpeter swans, bald eagles, and ospreys work the rivers and wetlands. Anglers come for the Snake River fine-spotted cutthroat, a trout found almost nowhere else in the world, swimming waters that native cutthroat have held since the ice age.

Notable features

The Bridger Wilderness runs up the west slope of the Wind River Range, beneath Gannett Peak -- at roughly 13,800 feet the highest point in Wyoming, straddling the Continental Divide on the boundary with the neighboring Shoshone National Forest. The Wind Rivers cradle the largest glaciers in the American Rockies, though most of that ice sits just across the Divide on the Shoshone side. The forest also holds the headwaters of the Green River and, up near the Yellowstone line in the Teton Wilderness, some of the source waters of the Snake. Two Ocean Pass, the Gros Ventre Slide, and the rhythmic Periodic Spring near Afton are all here -- see the fun facts.

Cool to know

• At the Parting of the Waters, in the Teton Wilderness, a single creek splits in two: one fork (Atlantic Creek) flows all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, the other (Pacific Creek) to the Pacific. A fish could, in theory, cross the Continental Divide right here. It's a National Natural Landmark.
• Periodic Spring, in Swift Creek Canyon near Afton, is a rare 'rhythmic' cold spring -- it swells and stops on a cycle of several minutes, one of only a handful of such springs known in the world. In late summer it can shut off almost completely, then surge back to life.
• The Kendall Warm Springs dace is a tiny fish that lives in exactly one warm-spring stream on the forest -- and nowhere else on Earth. It's federally endangered, and the little creek it calls home is closed to people to protect it.
• In 1925 the Gros Ventre Slide let go -- a huge, fast landslide that dumped a mountainside across the valley and dammed the Gros Ventre River, forming Lower Slide Lake. Two years later, in May 1927, part of that natural dam gave way and the flood tore through the town of Kelly downstream.
• Bridger-Teton is one of the largest national forests in the lower 48 -- more than three million acres -- and part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, one of the largest nearly-intact temperate ecosystems left on Earth.
• Gannett Peak, the highest mountain in Wyoming at roughly 13,800 feet, sits right on the forest's eastern edge along the Continental Divide -- one of the most remote major summits in the Rockies, a multi-day trek from the nearest trailhead.