I'm lucky to have such rad and talented friends who get to travel and take photos for a living! Bryan did a campaign for Avis car rental (see his work at the end of this post) and invited Jake, Andrew, and myself to tag along to Jackson Hole, WY in pursuit of "winter adventure." I've been wanting to see the Grand Tetons for awhile now, so I was beyond excited for this road-trip! I originally just wanted to make a BTS video of the trip, but these guys always inspire me to try to get better at my landscape photography, so I put the filming on hold half way through the trip to focus on my photos... But I still got a couple fun pieces of footage to make this little 1 minute vid of our trip:
(NOTE: Andrew and Jake's videos are also randomly included throughout this blog post)
We drove for 13 hours straight from Portland to Jackson Hole, with just a few stops for pics. Luckily we got into Jackson when we did; we were blessed with a stunning sunrise, sunset and an epic view of the Tetons for our first full day in the area. Our cabin was the cutest, coziest place to stay, too. If you go to Jackson Hole, WY, I highly recommend staying at Spring Creek Ranch
Like I said, we were fortunate to get into Jackson when we did because the following day was Jackson's first big snowfall of the season and the Tetons were not even visible with all of the snow. Although bummed the Tetons were not visible and all of the national park roads were closed, we still spent the day exploring around Jackson and found some wildlife as well as awesome historic houses on Old Morman Row. I finally got my pic under the Jackson antlers too, thank youuuuu Jake!
Since the snow was supposed to continue in Jackson for the next few days, we decided to leave and find other places to explore for the rest of the week. We attempted to drive the 4ish hours to Salt Lake City, but with the winter storm we got caught in, it took us the entire day (10 hours) to get to our SLC airbnb, only to find out that the exit off of the pass, to our airbnb cabin, was covered in 3 feet of snow and totally inaccessible. So we went into town, met up with the great @samuelelkins (i tried hard not to be a fan girl), and planned our next day's adventure. Check out Andrew's vlog of our 10 hour drive in the winter storm, the funniest guy helped us with our car mid-way through our drive and he was quite the character!
You have to check out the Alvord Hot Springs in the Alvord Desert (Southern Oregon) if you haven't already. It is literally in the middle of no where but so beautiful! Andrew spent hours in the hot springs while the rest of us drove out to the middle of the desert and were definitely the only ones for a 100 mile radius. We got out there just in time for sunset too, made a fire, took some pics, then joined Andrew back in the hot springs before heading to Bend for the evening.
Our last day, datboychad met up with us in Bend, OR and we went to check out a secret cave. Unfortunately, it was bat hibernation season and we didn't want to disrupt them (or kill them by invading their space), so we just frolicked around in the snowy forest outside of the cave. Such a fun day! These guys keep me entertained 24/7... watch Andrew's "don't fall in" video and you'll know why.
It was such an epic trip! Thankful for the beautiful places we explored and the priceless memories that we made. Check out some of Bryan's work he did for the Avis campaign below:
