Moran Junction: Where the Roads Meet the Tetons

Moran is less a town than a crossroads: the junction inside Grand Teton National Park where the road from Yellowstone meets the highway running south through Jackson Hole. It takes its name from Mount Moran, which honors the painter Thomas Moran, whose watercolors of Yellowstone in eighteen seventy-one helped persuade Congress to create the world's first national park the following year. A post office briefly operated here in the early twentieth century when homesteaders still held private claims along the Buffalo Fork of the Snake River.

The Moran area is also home to the Jackson Lake Dam, first built in nineteen oh six and replaced by a larger concrete dam in the nineteen tens, which raises the natural lake level by more than thirty feet to store irrigation water for Idaho farmers downstream. The dam remains a quiet tension inside a park built on wild ideals.