The spring weather has fully kicked in here with pleasant temperatures and afternoon rainstorms. It seems so pretty but the summer activities haven't fully developed quite yet. Teton Park road is open but most of the campsites are not, and trails are mostly snow-covered. Not to mention they are closing my beloved "lunch break hike" up High School Butte because it's privately owned and the family wants to revegitate it. Sad! Anyway, my birthday rolled around a few days ago and I was trying to think of something fun to do that didn't involve meeting up with a bunch of friends at a bar. Most of my friends are out of town for off-season right now, so doing something simple with David sounded like the perfect option. I called around to the National Forest offices and Teton Park office and found it difficult to find any campsites that were open. Settling for the semi-boring and $20/night Gros Ventre Campground off of the road to Kelly seemed like what we should do. We drove out there, noticing a stash of RVs parked along the river. Ugh. With some bad weather rolling through, we decided to check out the road up Shadow Mountain and see if it really was "snowed in." When we reached the base we laughed as we watched a car trying to navigate through a heard of bison (they were EVERYWHERE!) to get to its driveway. The base of the mountain had three open campsites which all stared the Tetons straight in the face. There was a closed sign for the road up the mountain, but what we were looking at seemed perfect! The rain stopped and the sun peeked through the abundance of fluffy clouds. We enjoyed an amazing dinner of salmon pesto pasta (made on our camp stove) and dessert -- mocha tres leches cake -- which David made from scratch. (I'm so impressed!) It was such a beautiful evening and I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else to celebrate my birthday.
