Grand Teton National Park

Jenny Lake is the premier front country destination in Grand Teton National Park, used by most of the park’s nearly five million annual visitors. Trails and overlooks around Jenny Lake provide some of the park’s most spectacular vistas. From Jenny Lake, the National Park Service (NPS) provides trail and shuttle boat access to magnificent Cascade Canyon and the Teton Range.

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Improving the Visitor Experience

For decades, the confusing trails, crumbling overlooks, and ugly river rock walls at Jenny Lake were unsuited to such a special place.

Fortunately, the Grand Teton National Park Foundation, a private non-profit, along with the NPS, funded a redesign of the visitor experience at Jenny Lake. A collaborative team lead by NPS landscape architect Matt Hazard, and including Hershberger Design and the Dry Stone Conservancy (DSC) created a stone work legacy appropriate for this beautiful setting.

Dry Stone Walls

To their great credit, the team decided on dry stone masonry in the tradition of the 1930’s-era Civilian Conservation Corp stone work at many our national parks. From 2016 through 2018, the DSC’s stone masons, working with NPS stone masons, rebuilt the overlooks, retaining walls, and shuttle boat landings.

 

Shuttle Boat Landing

The bridge abutment at the shuttle boat landing, shown above and below, is a beautiful example of the DSC’s stone work.

Wall Caps and Stair Treads

All of the walls are capped with six-inch-thick hewn granite slabs. Since many visitors are likely to climb onto the low walls, the heavy wall caps provide a safe stable surface.

Fabricating the wall cap and two sets of stair treads from rough granite slabs was a challenge for the DSC stone masons.

A Suitable Stone

The stone for such a project must: (1) come in the necessary sizes and shapes, (2) be durable enough for this extreme environment, (3) be geologically appropriate for the setting, and (4) not be prohibitively expensive. Select Stone worked with granite quarrier Desert Stone to provide wall stone, rough cap/tread slabs, and specialty boulders to meet the project goals.

Salt and Pepper Granite

Light-colored “salt and pepper” granites are fairly common in the northern Rockies, although few are actively quarried today. These granites solidified from magma while deep in the crust and consist of tightly interlocking crystals of quartz, feldspar, biotite, and hornblende. This mixture of minerals gives these granites their color range, workability, and durability.

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