"When I visited Idaho Falls last summer I had no idea that seeing anything like the Tetons was in store for me. I didn’t know that this type of mountain even existed; graceful, rocky peaks soaring straight up out of flat ground, surrounded by picturesque lakes and forest. They are astonishing, and have been etched in my mind’s eye ever since. But if I do get fuzzy on the details, I have this wonderful book to jog my memory, and show me places I didn’t even see in the first place.

The text is an account written by Nathaniel Pitt Langford, of an 1872 expedition in which he and James Stevenson became the first white men to reach the summit of the Grand Teton, or Mount Hayden as it was then called. It was a fascinating read, and I could roughly follow their route on my fold-out maps of Idaho highways and Grand Teton, although I suspect many other place names besides Mount Hayden may have changed. My map doesn’t have contour elevations so I couldn’t trace the exact route up the mountain, but enjoyed having photographs that show approximately the same views as the climbers would have seen. The photographer, David William Peterson, wrote that his pride was still recovering after reading how Langford and Stevenson reached the summit without modern climbing gear or guidebooks. But after reading their account, I would say that gamblers’ luck had a good deal to do with it too, and while I do recognize their courage and stamina, they could just as easily have fallen to their deaths. It sounded hair-raising!

One other thing that incidentally caught my attention, was a photograph of a pelican at Colter Bay which looked completely out of place to me, because I had always assumed that pelicans live only in Australia. American pelicans... now I know!"

Akkison, Goodreads review