Tetons Up Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Continental Divide

The Continental Divide is basically a ridge of high ground that determines the fate of every raindrop and snowflake that lands nearby. Water on the west side eventually wanders off toward the Pacific, while water on the east side begins a very long trip to the Atlantic. In Yellowstone, you can even find Isa Lake, which 'isa' more of a pond (see what I did there?), that sits right on the Divide and drains in both directions. That's just the sort of go-getter perfectionism that makes me look bad.

The image shows Two Ocean Pass, a fine spot with a fine name on the Continental Divide in the Teton Wilderness, a little south of Yellowstone National Park.

The Divide also pulls a fast one in Southern Wyoming by splitting into two branches around the Great Divide Basin, an area where water doesn't bother going to any ocean at all. It just sits there doing nothing until it gets sucked up by the air as evaporation, which is much more my speed. After that detour, the two branches reunite and continue south into Colorado.

Answer: Cody

Cody sits just east of the Montana line. It was founded in 1896 by William F. 'Buffalo Bill' Cody, who was already famous enough at the time to name a town after himself without anyone stressing too much about it. Today the place is basically a highlight reel of his career, from the Irma Hotel he built for his daughter to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, five museums in one, which still isn't enough real estate to contain his ego.

The town also happens to be the main eastern gateway to Yellowstone, lying about 50 miles (80 km) from the park's East Entrance along an incredibly scenic stretch of highway. Tourists roll on through Cody to gas up or grab a meal. The adventurous types take the time to see if rodeos are their thing before deciding they are anything but. Then they head into the park, which is what they're there for anyway.

Answer: The Wind River Range

The Wind River Range is where you'll find Wyoming's highest point, Gannett Peak, which towers to a height of 13,810 feet (42 hm) and no doubt taunts the more famous Grand Tetons with regular reminders that it is, in fact, taller (if only by a hair or two).

The peak does its thing in the Bridger and Shoshone National Forests, where it's surrounded by glaciers, including Gannett Glacier, which is the biggest single glacier in the American Rockies. Gannett Glacier hugs the mountain like a tourist who really doesn't want to make the hike back to camp, which is exactly what I'd be doing were I silly enough to hike UP there in the first place.

If you're wondering, the largest glacier in the Rockies is the Saskatchewan Glacier up where they eat poutine and talk funny. If the wind is just right, Gannett Glacier can hear its counterpart, ten times the size, taunting it.

Reaching Gannett Peak is not like walking to the corner store, which immediately counts me out. Climbers call Wyoming's one of the hardest highest points to reach in the country. The location is remote, the approach is long, and the mountain is covered in snow and ice even when everyone with any sense is wondering why they left the house.

The first successful climb was in 1922, which seems awfully late, until you read that early climbers had to get there without the benefit of modern equipment, satellite maps, or the emotional support that freeze-dried meals provide. Today, anyone who makes it to the summit earns the bragging rights of standing on a peak that most people haven't heard of... while the Tetons quietly sulk in the distance.

Answer: Jackson

Jackson, Wyoming lies at the southern end of the Jackson Hole valley, and it's a charming little town that serves as the front door to Grand Teton National Park. Tourists roll on through the place on their way to see the Tetons, which from the east appear against the landscape, looking more like shark fins than what the French-Canadians of years past would have you believe.

And yes, French-Canadian fur trappers named the mountain range "Les Trois Tétons" meaning "The Three Breasts". Looking for beaver pelts is lonely business.

For Jackson's part, it does its best to look presentable in front of such majestic... peaks, with wooden boardwalks, art galleries, the usual tourist traps, and the famous antler arches on the town square. Yes, that's a thing.

It also happens to be surrounded by ski resorts that bring out everyone from the usual powder freaks to people who just want to say they survived Corbet's Couloir. Based on the pictures I'm looking at right now, I'm not convinced anyone does.

Answer: Devils Tower National Monument

If you've watched 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind', you've probably made a mashed potato sculpture of Devils Tower on a dinner plate at some point in your life. And who can blame you?

Geologists call Devils Tower an 'igneous intrusion', which sounds dirtier than it is. It means molten rock muscled and clawed its way upward and cooled into what looks like... well, a massive tree stump. The stump towers over a thousand feet above the surrounding area. Impressive for an ambitious blob of magma.

Long before it became the first national monument in the United States, the Tower was and remains a sacred place for more than twenty Native American tribes, including the Lakota, Cheyenne, Crow, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Shoshone. Many of these nations know it by names like Bear Lodge or Bear Tipi, and they still hold ceremonies, leave prayer cloths, and honor the site as a place of strong spiritual significance.

And then Steven Spielberg came along...

Answer: The Yellowstone River

The Yellowstone is kind of the bad boy among rivers in the United States. It flows north out of Wyoming, which is just not the direction most rivers here feel like going.

It begins at Yellowstone Lake, fed by streams of the Absaroka Range, a part of the Rockies. From there, it heads through Yellowstone National Park (see image). It drains the iconic Yellowstone National Park, so yeah, it has some pretty good credentials when it comes to scenery.

Our friend here is the longest free-flowing river in the contiguous United States, which means there are no dams telling it what to do and how to do it. It just does what it does. And what it does is carving valleys, supporting wildlife, and refusing to be tamed.

Describing rivers is hard.

Answer: Register Cliff

Register Cliff sits near the town of Guernsey in eastern Wyoming, and its big claim to fame is the soft sandstone wall... and the natural urge of people to put their names on things. Thousands of Oregon Trail travelers, including the curiously named T.H. Unthank, could not resist carving their names and the date into the soft rock of the cliff.

The cliff rises about a hundred feet above the North Platte River valley, and the rock is soft enough that travelers in the 1840s and 1850s could carve their names with pocketknives, basic tools, or whatever they had handy. Some inscriptions go back even earlier, including one from 1829.

The site often served as a first-night camp after leaving Fort Laramie, giving people plenty of time to rest, water their livestock, and make themselves famous in the rock before being alerted by their computer that they had in fact died of dysentery.*

Today, Register Cliff is one of the three major pioneer graffiti sites in Wyoming, along with Independence Rock and Names Hill. Visitors can still walk along the base of the cliff and see many of the original carvings, though the historically important ones are now protected behind fencing to keep them safe from modern doodlers, which is apparently a big problem. People today are apparently very similar in that respect to people back then.

*For everyone that doesn't get the reference, "Oregon Trail" was a video game created in the 1970s and continues to linger on. Death was common, and yes, "You have died of dysentery" was one of your possible misfortunes.

Answer: Yellowstone National Park

Sure, that's Yellowstone National Park, which happily reminds you that the ground beneath your feet is basically a giant simmering cauldron, ready to explode and kill you at any second. In fact, that's exactly why the place is packed with geysers, hot springs, mud pots, steam vents, and all that.

Old Faithful is the undisputed celebrity of the bunch. It erupts on a schedule that is pretty... well, faithful for something running on boiling water and volcanic heat. It shoots columns of water more than 100 feet into the air and has been doing so since long before anyone thought to take a selfie with it. While Old Faithful gets the celebrity treatment, it's just one of nearly 500 geysers in the place, all fueled by the massive magma chamber lurking below the surface.

You know, the one trying to kill you.

Beyond the geysers, Yellowstone's geothermal features include the rainbow-colored hot springs and the bubbling mud pots that look like Mom is trying to cook something that you already know you won't like.

Places like the Upper Geyser Basin, Norris Geyser Basin, and West Thumb have cool features like the tallest active geyser in the world and pools so beautiful and colorful that they seem fake until you smell the sulfur and realize they are very real.

And they all want to kill you.

Answer: The Green River

Great. Another river.

The Green River starts high up in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, where it begins its long and winding journey south. It flows through western Wyoming, dips briefly into Colorado, and then spends most of its time wandering through Utah before meeting the Colorado River in Canyonlands National Park.

If the image for this question is underwhelming, that's because it's near the source. By the time it hits Utah, it's carving canyons out of red rock and doing crazy circus tricks. (See my Utah quiz, 'Wasatch You Know'.)

But in Wyoming, the Green River is a place where you can fish, float, hike, or simply sit on a rock and contemplate what you're doing sitting on a rock in Wyoming. There's plenty of kayaking, and if you're feeling ambitious (I'm not), you can head to the Flaming Gorge for some big views.

At the Seedskadee Wildlife Refuge along the river, you can see birds, deer, and the occasional fox, which is no doubt also pondering what its doing in Wyoming. It's all very scenic, very peaceful, and just adventurous enough that you can tell people you "did the outdoors" without actually lying.

Answer: Sheridan

We end the quiz in the north-central Wyoming town of Sheridan at the base of the Bighorn Mountains. Much like Salt Lake County, the mountains give it the kind of backdrop that makes every convenience store trip for beer seem like a sight-seeing excursion.

The town is proud of its history, and it's earned the right. Main Street is lined with buildings old enough to have seen more than a few people making bad decisions, and many of those buildings are now home to museums, shops, and ancient neon signs that must have looked really fancy during the Jurassic period.

Places like the Museum at the Bighorns and the historic Sheridan Inn help anchor that sense of place. It all goes to give the downtown its special cocktail of that Old West charm and more contemporary Starbucks-fueled bustle.

The downtown district is also packed with restaurants, galleries... and if you're looking for bars, we've got both kinds in Sheridan: country and western. Bring a cowboy hat. It's Wyoming, and it's the law.

Sheridan has more than forty buildings on the National Register of Historic Places. With the Bighorn Mountains looming just to the west, outdoor excitement awaits you (when you're done with the hiking, I'll be at the bar... with my cowboy hat).