From Yellowstone I traveled south to Jackson Hole, which is a valley neighboring with the high Teton Mountains, hence the name of the park: Grand Teton NP. The area between Yellowstone and Grand Teton was donated to the Park by the Rockefeller family in 1950 (about 13 thousand hectares), so the picturesque 132-kilometer-long corridor of forests was named John D. Rockefeller Jr Memorial Parkway. Visible from a distance in the picture below are three granite towers: Grand Teton, Middle Teton and South Teton:
Grand Teton peaks are situated over huge Jackson Lake, which is the biggest of the many glacier lakes in the Park:
The upper sections of Grand Teton towers are covered with snow and ice, hence their blue-grey color. Those mountains are among the youngest ranges in the Rocky Mountains - they are about 20 million years younger than the Alps. Below them you can see the water of the Snake River (click on the picture and it grows):
The view of the valley was shot from Signal Mountain, which is situated on the other side of Jackson Lake and offers a vantage point from which to view both Grand Teton (the picture above) and the huge valleys lying to the south-east of the mountain.
Another view from Signal Mountain over the huge valley and the Snake River:
From Grand Teton NP we traveled south-east to Lander, where we spent the night. In the evening we had a substantial dinner in a local pizza restaurant and watched Michael Phelps win his seventh gold medal in swimming. When we left Lander on the next morning, the clouds looked ominous, as you can see in the picture below, and a storm seemed inevitable: 
"The cloud stoops to kiss the mountain" was my diary caption for the view below. The atmosphere in the Rocky Mountains was very different from that offered by the Sierra Nevada:
Because the Rockies are so huge, a tourist relishes in admiring very diversified landscapes. The picture below was taken already in Colorado. The sunny weather promised a nice afternoon in Denver: 
Unfortunately, Denver did not welcome us with sunny weather. Maybe because the city's elevation is about a mile above sea level and because it is situated practically on the borderline of the Rocky Mountains, it was cold, rainy and cloudy: 
Since the weather was so unfriendly to tourists, I did not take many pictures of the city, only a snapshot or two of the City Center, which did not strike me as particularly original. Colorado advertises itself as a "colorful" state but I found the slogan misleading: 
On the next morning, after we said goodbye to S, we continued our journey through the Rockies south to Cortez, which meant that we would have to cover a distance of about 690 km. In the picture below snow-covered peaks are shining far away: 
The Rockies offered us an extreme experience of driving in a snowstorm in August. The flashes of lightning, the hail as big as rubble which bombarded the roof of the car, the slippery road which made it impossible to move faster than 10 miles per hour - all this made our trip in the Rockies quite dangerous and exciting (well, it actually felt exciting only after we got out of the sleet): 
Such surprises caused by the weather are common in the Mountains; below you can see a ramp for trucks which get caught in snowstorms - it helps truck drivers stop the vehicle when brakes don't work on the slippery road:
The Rockies are fairy mountains indeed. The picture shows the mountains after the storm: the water evaporates quickly and the steam looks like smoke from a fire:
Another snapshot of the Mountains after the rain - eerie:
Believe it or not, but the river visible below is the famous Rio Grande, the fourth largest river in the U.S. and a natural border between the U.S. and Mexico (known as the Rio Bravo there). Here it is still small, because the picture was taken very close to the River's spring, when we crossed the Rio Grande in Colorado, driving west along route 160. From here it took us a couple of hours to get to Mesa Verde NP, which will come next on the blog.
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