Alan in Pre Departure
Continuing my research into Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks I have sourced some topological maps produced by National Geographical from Stanford's online.
As will be apparent from the sample to the right the maps are not of the same quality as the Ordnance Survey maps produced here in the UK, but as the USA is a larger country to map than the UK, I guess we can forgive them.
The maps also gave me my first opportunity to try and identify some of the routes and locations mentioned in the trip itinerary. I had not realised that the two national parks (Yellowstone to the north) practically adjoined each other.
From the maps Grand Teton appears the more rugged of the two, but its easy to become blase looking at the maps and fail to appreciate that even the altitude of the valleys can be 8,000ft. To put that in perspective the highest mountain in the UK is Ben Nevis at 4409ft.
In fact it appears that the trek in Grand Teton is actually mainly outside of the park to the west in the Jedediah Smith Wilderness.
Whilst I was aware that there was wildlife in the parks, I failed to appreciate the abundance of animal including elk, bison and even bears. It would appear that bears, especially grizzly, can be a major hazard and talk of pepper spray certainly got my attention as did this account of a lone hikers encounter with a grizzly in Yellowstone. Some great trail pictures here. 
Whilst enquiring of Tim Nicholl at KE Adventure, whether open fires were allowed in the National Parks (in marked grates in Yellowstone NP, no restrictions in the Jedediah Smith/Grand Teton portion) I also asked him, tongue in cheek, what the procedure was if our guide was eaten by a grizzly bear whilst we were out in the back country. His answer ... "If the guide is eaten by a bear, it will be best if one of the clients knows what number to call on the satellite phone that goes out with each group" .
It seems that even in the back country one is never more than a phone call away from civilisation - still at least if we can't light a fire we can order a Domino pizza.
There's more to this back country trekking lark than I had anticipated - I need to investigate not only best practices for managing encounters with bears, but many other things like safe food storage and water purification.
Time to read around on the web again ...