One hundred years of the Presbyterian Church of Frankford

Nine million years ago, the Tetons didnБЂ™t exist. The land around Jackson Hole was just a high grassy plain. But then a forty-mile-long fault opened within the Earth, and since then, about once every nine hundred years, the Tetons experience a really big earthquake, enough to jerk them another six feet higher. It is these repeated jerks over eons that have raised them to their present majestic heights of seven thousand feet. That nine hundred years is an average-and a somewhat misleading one. According to Robert B. Smith and Lee J. Siegel in Windows into the Earth, a geological history of the region, the last major Teton quake was somewhere between about five and seven thousand years ago. The Tetons, in short, are about the most overdue earthquake zone on the planet. Hydrothermal explosions are also a significant risk. They can happen anytime, pretty much anywhere, and without any predictability. БЂњYou know, by design we funnel visitors into thermal basins,БЂ«Doss told me after we had watched Old Faithful blow ...»