Top Things to Do in Jackson

Dawn frost crackles as you leave Jackson, climbing past hayfields where bison steam in half-light. Your naturalist kills the engine when a grizzly sow ambles into view, her cubs tumbling like dark tumbleweeds against the pink Absaroka skyline.

This full-day private SUV swings from Jackson past glacial moraines to the foot of Mount Moran, then south to the Gros Ventre slide and north again for a picnic on the Snake River's braided gravel bars.

Your biologist guide keeps a logbook of geyser predictions. While crowds mass on the boardwalk, you slip to a lesser vent where turquoise water belches in sync with your pulse.

Leave Jackson at 6 a.m.; by 8 you're sipping coffee at West Thumb while thermophiles, neon bacteria, swirl like living lava lamps under your boots.

This hybrid drive-and-hike drops you at Fairy Falls trailhead where singed pine mingles with sulfur. Hike three miles past osprey nests to a 200-foot cascade and a hidden thermal creek warm enough to soak sore calves.

Your guide anchors above a gravel bar, hands you a 5-weight rod, points to a seam where the current tongue drops. The first strike feels like the river's own pulse.

You mount at dawn, leather creaking like cold timber while the trail climbs through arrowleaf balsamroot blooms to a high meadow set with a canvas wall tent.

A photographer-guide pilots the SUV; sliding roof hatches kill window reflections so you can frame a bison bull's frost-dusted beard at eye level.

Lunch is linen-served at a backcountry pavilion near Gibbon Meadows: bison short-rib sliders, huckleberry lemonade, a thermos of elk chili while ravens circle overhead.

Wade upper Flat Creek outlet where water is knee-deep and so clear you can watch trout flare gills before inhaling a hopper.