My father taught me to appreciate the beauty of this mountain range on our first trip to Island Park. I was in high school, and we were traveling on Highway 20. I was frustrated for over an hour, because north of Pocatello, no one listened to "hippy" music. Just because I wore cowboy boots and also wore a hat for work to match did not mean I was a fan of all that crap that I found over the airwaves. There was nothing but hardcore "wahhoo doodoo." I was frantically working the radio dial on our '64 Chevrolet truck listening intently for any chance new discovery, when I am sure my dad was finally fed up with the ritual that I had to have done every ten to twenty minutes."Look over there." He pointed eastward while keeping his hands on the steering wheel of the truck. I looked and saw nothing.
"What?" I looked at the backyards of homes and scanned the horizon for anything interesting. Dad usually did not say that unless he saw a deer or pheasant on the road.
"No, look at the mountain." That was the first time I saw them pointing skyward. We were between Idaho Falls and Rigby. Ironically, some 20 years later, I would be a teacher having worked in two school districts in that area.
I watched the mountains grow in size as we drove further northward. And when I met the first ranger at a station in Island Park where my dad purchased a permit to harvest pine poles, I asked him about the mountain range. A teenager's mind is a curious thing. The only thing I remember was how they received their name: given by lonely but nasty French trappers in the area during the nineteenth century.
Years later when I took Germans to look at what the French named so long ago, my dad asked me if I had visited Jenny's Lake--his favorite spot in that area. Eventually, we explored more of the area and finally hiked around the edge of the lake.
The first stop, for young hikers with plenty of stamina and energy is at the top of the trail above the western shore. It offers a spectacular view, especially in the fall with the yellow, orange and red colors of Aspen and Maple among the pine. The woods offer the pungent smell of the forest and the sound of mountain song birds. Just sitting and enjoying the view is something I will always miss, because it is a hike that I will never be able to take again.
I will always remember this set of pictures, because my daughter Lydia knew a student from her high school who died while he climbed in the area just a month before I took the German students there. I told them the story I heard from people in the area. The boy and a friend were climbing. One fell and slid down a large ice field. He drove his climbing axe into the ice to stop the dangerous slide. He looked up at his friend just as the chunk of ice fractured, sending the victim in the deep chasm. The surviving climber watched his friend look up just before he disappeared into a cloud. There was no scream. The story still haunts me, even though I never personally knew the climber.
The top of trail has a beautiful mountain stream and water fall. Spray rises in the shadows of the woods there. And you can hear the sounds of the stream.
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