Private Half-Day Grand Teton Tour

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 accommodated 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 pickup at your accommodation in a rooming safari 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 umbrellas 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.