FAQ

Private tours of Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks both have pickups at your accommodation. Wherever you are staying we will pick you up there. This is of course fully customizable. For instance if you want to picked up after a bit of lunch and shopping for a half day Sunset Tour, we can pick you up right there in downtown Jackson.

Generally speaking we start our morning tours at 6am, and our afternoon ‘half-day tours’ at 4pm. A 6am morning start time is based around catching sunrise. This makes for the best photos, the most flattering light for portraits (hello social media!) and most importantly the best time of day for wildlife activity. This also lets you beat the crowds. Beating the crowds can be especially important on Yellowstone tours which generally span 10-12 hours.

All ages and levels of fitness are well and accomodated on our tours! Physically, a tour of Grand Teton or Yellowstone require little of you beyond climbing in and out of a vehicle. For that purpose we always bring a step-stool to help out. On the other end of the spectrum if you are looking for a more physical adventure, trips can be customized to include hiking, swimming in Jenny Lake or the many others throughout the parks. If you’re really feeling wild on a Yellowstone Tour we can hike to your heart’s content – trekking for miles and up literal mountains can be done! A typical day in Yellowstone within a 10-12 hour tour has about 3 miles of walking if when guests feel like getting in a good stretch of the legs.

Most animals we are trying to find while out on our safari style tours are active at dawn and dusk. That said neither dawn nor dusk tends to outperform the other with numbers of wildlife that we see. That said, if you are looking to seize that day and don’t mind and early start, we recommend a sunrise half day tour. A sunset tour might be a better option for you and your group if you aren’t early risers but still want to see wildlife. Our pro tip is that you schedule a dinner reservation for immediately after your tour for as late as restaurants seat, and we drop you off there at the end of the tour.

Tours include picked up at in a rooming style vehicle that offers great views no matter where you are seating. Your personable biologist expert naturalist guide will provide you with in depth information about the plants, animals, history, geology and anything else you can think to ask about within Grand Teton, Jackson Hole, and Yellowstone National Parks. Inside of each vehicle we provide and snacks for every tours. Also included is a complimentary aluminum 20oz water bottle for each member of the tour to keep. High quality binoculars are provided to each person on the tour, and each vehicle will have high powered, tripod mounted scope. Your guide will teach you how to look through these optics and get the most out of having this equipment at your disposal. On full day tours of Grand Teton and Yellowstone we provide a high quality locally sourced picnic style meal of your choice of sandwiches, salad, sides and dessert.

Yellowstone’s southern entrance is located roughly and hour and a half north of the the town of Jackson and Teton Village. These are the most common places people stay on a visit to Jackson Hole. Sounds like a long ways, right? The time will fly by as this hour and a half is filled with a full south to north traverse along the length of the roads in Grand Teton National Park. As a plus, you will be knocking out this bit of the drive during prime wildlife viewing hours. Sightings, though never a guarantee with wildlife, can include bears, moose, elk, bison, deer, and pronghorn ‘antelope,’ and bald eagles. It’s very rare day to not see some wildlife en route to Yellowstone.

We have low humidity and big temperature swings in this part of the world. We are also at fairly high elevations – all above 6200 feet, and Yellowstone is at an average of roughly 8000 ft. This means the sun hits hard! For that reason, we recommend wearing some kind of hat for the sun. Sunglasses are helpful too.

Our guides like wearing lightweight long-sleeve shirts, and long pants when they guide for bug, sun, and cold temperature protection. Some of the best places for viewing wildlife in Grand Teton that are off the beaten path can be fairly buggy in the summer, which makes long pants and long sleeve shirts make that much more sense.

Since our mornings start off cold virtually every day of the year, and daily highs seldom climb beyond the mid eighties (with low humidity) you likely won’t be uncomfortably hot dressed like our guides do. Tennis shoes are great for any level of hiking you wish to tackle with us. Almost any type of footwear can work, but try to bring something you won’t mind getting a bit of dust or mud on. We always bring a layer and a raincoat with us on trips. We do have ubrellas and ponchos in vehicles if you forget your raingear though. We can’t recommend bringing a layer for warmth enough. Something as simple as a hoodie. There will be ample room to store it out of your way in the vehicle if you don’t end up using it. In the spring and fall we recommend beefing up the layers of clothing that you bring to puffy jackets or something similar that you might wear in the winter. Again there is always plenty room to stash layers out of the way in the vehicle.

Yes! From infants (we have car seats to use if you need) to high schoolers, our tours are fantastic for all ages. There is no better experience for seeing wildlife in North America! Kids find the experience riveting and are especially engaged during interactive stops out of the vehicle. Then whether romping up a hill for a better view, stooping to check out tracks, or holding their breathe listening in hushed awe to the howl of wolves or the bugle of a bull elk across a meadow they are sure to revel in their experience like none other!

Kid logistics wise, the snacks abound, lunches are tasty, and we are never far from a bathroom – both of the 5 star plumbed, flushing sort and behind a bush au naturale sort too. Private trips can be shortened a bit if that is a concern, or more time can be taken to allow for stopping to smell the wild roses, and skipping a few stones in a lake. We cater to kids having fun, so they leave as inspired by this spectacular place as our guides all did at their age. Call us to figure out how special activities can be built into the experience like a swim in a lake, or a short hike, completing the junior ranger program, setting plaster tracks for them to keep, or making a few casts of the fishing rod.

Note that our horseback riding trips do have a minimum age requirement of 7 years old.

We are never far from a bathroom with plumbing. That means a regularly cleaned “five star” bathroom with running water and flushing toilets. We know all of the best spots to hit. We will broken records offering to stop every time we pass one, and forecast the time it will take to get to the next one.

In between those “five star” bathroom are park service long-drop toilets that are there in case of real emergencies. These are situated along the roads such that we are never more than 5-10 minutes from them.

Then there is our favorite kind of bathrooms – the bushes. So long as we are discrete, and more than 200 feet from water should an emergency present itself, or maybe we are off on a hike, you can always take a tinkle wherever suits you.