Jackson

The Gros Ventre — Landslide Country & Granite Hot Springs

A day in the Gros Ventre country east of Jackson, a wild corner of the Bridger-Teton National Forest that most Teton visitors never see. The route climbs the Gros Ventre Road to the raw scar of the Gros Ventre Slide, the largest recorded landslide in U.S. history, where in 1925 half a mountainside slid into the valley and dammed the river. From there the day swings south into Granite Creek canyon for a hike to the roaring Granite Falls and a long soak in the historic Granite Hot Springs pool, a stone-and-log bathhouse built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s and fed by mineral springs at the head of the canyon. It is a day of geology, forest road, and hot water, entirely outside the national parks.

Swan Valley — A Lazy South Fork Float, Huckleberry Squares & Palisades Creek

Just over an hour west of Jackson, the pass drops out of the mountains into Idaho's Swan Valley, a broad quiet basin where the South Fork of the Snake River braids through cottonwood bottoms and farm fields. This is the gentlest possible day out: a lazy scenic float on one of the West's great cutthroat rivers, a stop for the valley's legendary huckleberry squares, and an easy streamside amble up Palisades Creek. There is nothing to conquer here and nowhere to rush — the whole point of Swan Valley is that the current does the moving for you while the cottonwoods and cliffs slide slowly past. It's the antidote to a hard-charging mountain trip, a day of slow water, huckleberry sugar, and low-country calm before the drive home over the pass.

Star Valley & Afton — The Elkhorn Arch, the Periodic Spring & Mormon Pioneer Country

An hour and a quarter south of Jackson, the Snake River canyon opens into Star Valley, a broad green basin ringed by the Salt River Range that Mormon settlers christened 'the Star Valley — the Star of all Valleys' when they arrived in the 1880s. This day trades the crowds of the national parks for the quiet heritage of a working ranching valley: Afton's world-record elkhorn arch spanning the main street, the rare and genuinely strange Periodic Spring that stops and starts on its own rhythm high in a side canyon, and the aviation and pioneer history of a town that once built its own airplanes. It is a day of small museums, big landscapes, and the tidy, chapel-dotted farmland of Wyoming's Mormon corner.