Index of other pages About the Ranch
A Brief History of the Ranch
Ranch Staff
Summer Internship 2011
Be sure also to read A Brief History of the Ranch.
The Grand Teton Climbers’ Ranch was first a dude ranch (dude!). Not any more. Since 1970, after the American Alpine Club gained a lease, GTCR has offered what elsewhere would be called simple hostel or hut accommodations, plywood double-decker bunks in bare rooms, some with toilet and sink. Windows and doors are screened. See also the GTCR FAQs page at the AAC site.
Cabin 1
There’s electricity–lights and outlets—in all cabins, some have cold-water sinks and flush toilets. Bring your sleeping bag and pad, cookstove and gear, and a chair for the roofed porch if you like. No cooking is allowed in the cabins; storage is in bear-boxes or in your car (Teton bears haven’t learned from the Yosemite cousins to open cars yet). In summer 2010 we’re making cooler chests and totes for food storage available on loan from the office, which also sells ice to guests.
The common open cook-shelter instead provides a center of conversation, new friendships, and surprising or familiar lessons in camp-stove cuisine.
Men’s and women’s hot-water showers are free to ranch residents, a pair of sinks serve for cooking clean-up. You’ll find recycle containers, free loaner bicycles (why return to a sauna of a car after a good day’s climb?), a library mainly of mountaineering books—histories, guidebooks, biographies and autobiographies, a small collection of climbing fiction, journals, and more.
The library has wi-fi connection as well as books and journals
Most of all there’s a community of new and old friends, where everyone is welcome and everyone manages to get along.
GTCR cannot guarantee families or groups will all be housed together, we don’t pay attention to gender in assigning cabins or bunks, there are no fire-rings—in fact no outside fires are allowed, and most climbers get to sleep relatively early—some leave in middle of the night alpine starts for long climbs or to beat the softening snow in early and mid-season and the afternoon thunderstorms in summer.
Cabins vary in size and location (see also photo on home page):
The views are astounding, perhaps best of all up to the Lower Saddle south of the Grand Teton, with Disappointment Peak rarely distinguishable against the faces of the Grand.
Grand Teton with Lower Saddle on left, from the ranch
The clear view panorama includes the Grand, Owen and Teewinot.
The Cathedral Group from the Ranch
Sandhill cranes fly over morning and evening, coyotes may wake you in the night-time, ground-squirrels are everywhere—they stole insulation from under the hood of my car two years ago (flummoxing my Iowa mechanic), and a cabin will occasionally have mouse problems (remember! no food in the cabins unless tightly sealed, and don’t nibble, dropping crumbs!). Hot hikers and climbers have been known to submerge in Cottonwood Creek, a few hundred yards back down the road (though the fishing is closed in early season). There are elk and deer to be seen in the meadows around Geraldine’s Rock north from the entry road at the creek, sometimes also right around the cabins, and an occasional bear explores the boundaries between our territory and theirs.
Crossing Cottonwood Ck going in to Ranch
See also the general post about Work Week, the first full five-day week of June each year, when we clean up, repair, improve, and salvage what those Philadelphians from the 1920s (history) loved about their dude ranch. Dude!
