32 - Mountain Profile: The Grand Teton

At 13,770 feet, the Grand Teton reveals a complete alpine world: a foreboding North Face, sunny classic ridges, steep snow couloirs and (sometimes) ice lines. Yet perhaps what's most interesting, as local historian Paul Horton says, is "the interaction of man and mountain over the years. It's remarkable, maybe unique among American mountains, that such a complex history was so well preserved." Renny Jackson retells stories drawn from more than a century of written records and oral tradition—from vision quests to epic rescues—about the tallest peak of Wyoming's Teton Range. Irene Beardsley, Susan Chaplin, Lito Tejada-Flores, Dave Carman and Mark Newcomb describe the aspirations that led them to seek their own meaning in the heights.