Summer Escape · ALC CONNECT Magazine, Summer-Fall 2026
Five days, three lakes, and one quiet reminder that a life well-built is also a life well-lived.
There is a moment on the drive in — somewhere past the last soft roll of sagebrush flats — when the Tetons simply appear. Not gradually. Not with the polite overture most mountain ranges give you. They rise straight out of the valley floor, nearly seven thousand feet of granite and snowfield, with no foothills to ease you into the conversation.
I've since learned there's a reason for that. The Teton Range is the youngest uplift in the Rocky Mountains — a geological adolescent at roughly nine million years, still growing along the Teton fault, still shrugging its shoulders upward. The Snake River simply hasn't had time to carve the gentle approach that older ranges wear like a hem. What you get instead is verticality, immediate and unapologetic.
I remember gripping the steering wheel a little tighter and thinking: oh.
I have spent decades helping people find the places they will call home. I know what it means when a room stops someone mid-sentence. I know the particular silence that falls when a space is genuinely, undeniably right. The Tetons do that — but on a scale that reorders something inside you. You do not admire them. You submit to them.
We had five days. I want to tell you it was not enough. But the honest, more surprising truth is this: it was exactly enough.
The trip began, as the best ones do, with people. My sister-in-law and I have that particular kind of friendship that grows sideways out of family — unchosen at first, then chosen over and over again. There's an ease to it now, thirty years in, that I don't take for granted. Five days in a valley with no meetings, no showings, no contract deadlines, and no reason to look at a screen is a rare and expensive kind of luxury. Not expensive in dollars. Expensive in the courage it takes to actually put the phone down.
I have built a career, a brokerage, a magazine, and a dinner series on the belief that gathering is not frivolous — that the table is where the real work of a life gets done. And still, I am as guilty as anyone of letting the calendar eat the summer alive.
So this was the experiment: what happens if we simply stop?
What happened is that we talked. Long, meandering, unhurried conversations that had nowhere to be. We laughed at things that would not be funny to anyone else. We watched the light move across Teewinot at seven in the evening and said nothing at all for a full ten minutes, which — if you know me — is its own small miracle.
Every good trip develops a ritual within forty-eight hours, and ours was Persephone.
If you've been to Jackson, you already know. If you haven't: Persephone Bakery sits on East Broadway in a whitewashed space with a wall of wooden spoons — the most photographed wall in town, and deservedly so. Kevin and Ali Cohane founded it in 2011 after Kevin trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and what began as a wholesale operation selling French-inspired baguettes at the farmers market has become something close to a civic institution. James Beard semifinalist. Named the most beautiful coffee shop in Wyoming. They source from more than twenty regional farms, ranches, and dairies. They bake only what they'll sell that day, which means they do sell out — so go early.
We went early. Every day.
There is something about a croissant that has been made properly — the shatter of it, the honest butter — eaten outside at eight in the morning with the mountains doing what mountains do in the background. It is not complicated. That's rather the point. I spend an enormous amount of my professional life on refinement, on layering, on the fifth course. And here was a reminder that the highest form of luxury is often just something made well by someone who cares, eaten slowly, in good company.
Get the line. Get the coffee. Get two pastries. You will not regret the second one.
Then there was the hike.
Delta Lake is roughly eight miles round trip from the Lupine Meadows trailhead, with about 2,300 feet of ascent — and I want to be very clear with you about what those numbers do and do not convey.
The first mile is generous. Forested, gentle, almost lulling. Then the trail turns toward the mountains and stops pretending. Six long switchbacks climb eleven hundred feet in a mile and a half, with the tree cover thinning until there is no shade left to hide in. The compensation, and it is real, is the view: Bradley and Taggart Lakes opening up below you like two dropped mirrors, wider and bluer with every turn.
And then the trail junction that isn't marked at all.
Delta Lake is not maintained by the Park Service. The last stretch is an unofficial route worn in by the feet of everyone who came before, and it ends in a boulder field you scramble — five hundred vertical feet in a half mile, hands involved, cairns your only guide. There was a point on that scramble where I stopped, breathing hard, and had a very direct conversation with myself about whether I had any business being there.
I did. We all did. We went up.
Delta Lake sits in a glacial cirque directly beneath the east face of the Grand, and it is the most impossible shade of turquoise I have ever seen in nature — the color comes from glacial flour, rock ground to powder by the Teton Glacier above and suspended in the meltwater, scattering light back at you in a blue that photographs cannot honestly reproduce. I have the pictures. They are beautiful. They are not the thing.
We sat on the rocks and ate our sandwiches and did not say very much.
Here is what I keep returning to. The trail does not care who you are. It does not care what you've closed this quarter or how many people follow you or what your title is. It asks one question — will you keep going? — and it asks it about four hundred times. There's a clarity in that I found almost medicinal.
The next day we did Taggart and Bradley — and if Delta Lake is the exclamation point, this is the long, beautiful sentence.
The loop runs a comfortable five to six miles from the Taggart Lake trailhead with only about four hundred feet of gain, winding through meadow and lodgepole and glacial moraine. Taggart arrives first, still and clear, with the range mirrored on its surface on a windless morning. Bradley follows, a little quieter, a little more its own.
We ambled. We took photographs of wildflowers I could not name. We stopped whenever anyone wanted to stop.
I've been thinking about how a good life needs both hikes. The one that empties you out and gives you back to yourself, and the one you take with people you love where the destination is genuinely beside the point. We spend so much of our energy chasing the summit version of everything. But most of a life is the valley trail — and the valley trail, it turns out, is glorious.
You knew we would get here eventually.
Hand Fire Pizza occupies the old Teton Theater, a single-screen house that opened in 1941 and went dark in 2012. It could have been torn down. Instead it came back as a pizzeria in 2017 — original marquee and ticket booth intact, everything wood-fired by hand. We ate there on a loud, happy weeknight, and I loved it for reasons that had little to do with the pizza, though the pizza is excellent. Someone chose preservation over convenience. That is the same instinct I bring to a historic listing, or to a recipe written out longhand by someone's grandmother. Things carry memory, and it costs something to honor that.
StillWest Brewery & Grill sits across from the base of Snow King, a wall of glass framing the slope like a painting. We came in dusty and sunburned, sat out on the best patio in town, and stayed far longer than we'd planned while the mountain went gold behind us. Nobody dressed up. Everybody was happy.
And then Saturday night, The Bistro at The Cloudveil — a Parisian brasserie in spirit, with a stunning zinc bar and a wine list that respects every price point. It was, in a word, fantastic. I sat there with people I love, in a room designed by someone who understood that a restaurant is a stage for a relationship — the lighting, the pacing of the courses, the way the wine arrived at precisely the right moment — and felt what I always feel when hospitality is done properly. Gratitude, and right behind it, inspiration. This is the work. Not the food alone, but the container it creates for people to be fully present with one another.
Five days, it turns out, is exactly the right measure. Long enough that the nervous system finally believes you — somewhere around day three my shoulders came down from around my ears. Short enough that you don't start unpacking your whole life into it. You go on the hike, you eat the pastry, you sit at the table, you sleep like the dead, and you get up and do it again.
We came home on a Tuesday and everything was still there: the listings, the deadlines, the inbox doing what inboxes do. But something had shifted, and it has not shifted back.
Every so often you need to stand at the foot of a nine-million-year-old mountain range, red-faced and out of breath, to remember why you believe what you believe about how a life should be spent. The Tetons don't need us. They were here before and they'll be here after, entirely indifferent to our quarterly goals — which is exactly what makes them such generous teachers.
Go take a few breaths.