Notes on camping

We opened the shades at first light this morning after turning on the heater and were startled to see movement on the ground – not the now-familiar moose moving through the campground, but a young man stirring in his sleeping bag out in the sage meadow. No tent, although nights drop to the 30s. We're amazed at the number of tents at this place in this season – more than we see at a typical California campground. People are tougher here.
Doing our laundry at Colter Bay campground, we met a pleasant gray-haired woman in an Obama T-shirt who spoke with a Texas twang as she unloaded clothes from a bicycle pannier. From Ft. Worth, she and her husband were recreating their honeymoon trip of 25 years ago, riding their bikes across the country. She’d just completed the 1,200 miles from Portland and had to get back to work, while her husband was going on to Virginia.
“You rode over Teton Pass? Over the mountains?”
“Oh sure, it’s not bad. We only go about 50 miles a day. If I can do it anyone can.”
“I don’t think so. And you carry your tent? Cooking utensils? Stove?”
“Yep – everything fits in the bags. It’s really not bad at all. The only bad day we had was trying to outrun a storm in Idaho, and we were bucking a head wind of about 30 miles an hour. Then the storm hit, with lightening and buckets of rain, and I got a flat tire and we were trying to change it in the rain. But a local came by and loaded us into his pickup and took us back to town.”
She was going to deliver clean clothes and the tent to her husband, who was going over a 9,000’ pass that day and they’d planned to meet up at the post office in Dubois (pronounced du boys). On a political note, she said she’d had positive response to her T-shirt, even from overall-clad farmers in Montana.
On a ranger-led hike yesterday we met a retired couple from Missouri who were tent camping (sleeping on the ground) in our campground, one of only two still open this late in the season.
“Staying warm at night?” we asked, and they replied that they do this every year. In another day, they would meet up with their ranger son for a five-day backpacking/canoe trip.
Many of the hikers we encounter on "moderate" (i.e., huff and puff) trails appear to be in their 80s, and they often pass us up. We are getting used to the 6,400' altitude.
Like the tourists from the east coast who came here in the 1880s and dressed up in silly cowboy gear at the dude ranches, we feel like softies. Our new solar panels keep the battery charged to power lights at night, the fan for the heater and recharge my laptop. (Although I still have to seek wifi outside the campground, favoring the Jackson Lake Lodge, where I'm currently sipping a beer and looking out over the mountains.) At night we listen to NPR out of Laramie and dine on roasted fig and Gorgonzola pizza made with pizza dough brought from home.
While bathrooms at California campgrounds are often steamy from showers and filled with women using hair dryers, hair gel and applying makeup, most campgrounds here (including ours) don’t even have showers, the bathroom’s a long hike away and you can’t even keep a water bucket outside because of the bears.
Still, it appears many have found how beautiful it is this time of year, and we're surprised at the number of campers -- Swiss and Brits in tents, Germans in rent-a-campers. We're happy in Happy. More pictures on another day.