Here's a sight: it's darkish, pre-dawn, on the banks of a wild stream, way out west where the buffalo roam. There's a chill breeze wafting fog across the water. The pond ripples gently. A flicker in the distance gives away an elk in the brush. Another ripple suggests a beaver about his business, reinforcing his downstream dam.

On the bank, there is a row of men lined up behind tripods, all facing the same direction, cameras pointing and shutter fingers poised.

But they are not interested in the shy wildlife around them, busy foraging for breakfast, or in the idyllic wilderness scene laid out before them, the pines and the cottonwoods as far as they can see.
They are concerned with a jagged outline looming over them, emerging at an agonisingly slow pace from the dark night sky to the west.

Behind them, to the east, shafts of light betray the occasional car speeding along the main road atop a ridge, far enough away that they're mute. The cars dart from bush to bush, silhouetted against the lightening dawn, their headlights searching the sky, like Hollywood.

The men with the riparian cameras dance softly to warm themselves in the pre-dawn chill. They chat sporadically. Most have never seen each other until arriving by that pond in the pre-dawn dark. They are here, by Schwabacher Landing, down the road from the old Rockefeller place, to catch on their digital sensors one of the most spectacular sights in nature: the falling of the first rays of the sun on the Grand Teton mountains.

They are hoping, as one, that the morning will be clear, that these mountains will not be shrouded in cloud as the sun rises, shining its soft, warm light on the peaks, piercing the pre-dawn autumn chill, as the countryside around them remains in the dark.

The sun on the Grand Tetons in the early dawn certainly is spectacular. We know this from tourist publicity photographs, and we imagine it having viewed the mountains the afternoon before. The challenge now is to capture that evocative dawn scene ourselves.

Photography is the gentler form of hunting. Around the Tetons, in the far west of Wyoming, in the United States north-west, wildlife abounds. In the early morning hours in the Teton Valley, "hunters" armed with cameras are out in force, creating their own traffic peak hour as they scurry about the district in cars, looking for targets.

Over there, there's a family of white-tailed deer -- two adults and a fawn -- grazing in the long grass. Back by the bridge, there's a moose mooching around the creek bank. Watch out! Up ahead, there's a coyote scurrying across the road... after something; we can't tell what. It's feeding time for all these creatures, and they are active.

If you see a car stopped by the country road, you stop, too, for it's certainly found wildlife worth "shooting".

We are driving along the road just outside the National Elk Refuge, where each winter up to 8,000 elk come down from the mountains and hills surrounding the ski resort of Jackson to weather the bitter cold of winter.

But the focus around here is the Grand Tetons, the centrepiece of Grand Teton National Park, sitting just inside Wyoming from the border with Idaho, in the United States' north-west.

The Tetons are the product of an ancient fault, rising abruptly from the Teton Valley of Jackson Hole to the east, and the flat pan plains to the west in Idaho.

They rise from nowhere. You can only imagine the forces that created them, driving this craggy, jagged tooth range up from the plains on either side, but leaving the hole almost untouched, like a wrinkle in a bedspread.

The Tetons abut the world's most famous national park, Yellowstone, to the north. They are, perhaps, Yellowstone's poorer, lesser known cousin, but they are more dramatic than Yellowstone visually, more focusssed and more concentrated.

Jackson is an anomaly in the wild west. At election time last year, it was the sole spot of blue on a red map, indicating that it alone of the townships and communities of Wyoming voted Democrat in an otherwise Republican state.

"It's all those New Yorkers moving out there, trying to turn Wyoming Democrat," said an aggrieved Republican, born and raised in Wyoming.

Jackson is a magnet for skiers, especially those from the affluent north-eastern and western seaboards. It attracts lots of "stars" and "artists", tree-changers looking for an idyllic lifestyle in a region of stunning beauty.

As a result, the area is big on locally produced arts and crafts with lots of nightlife, a diversity of accommodation, and mountain experiences year-round.

But it's not just a ski resort, as the Tetons and the regions wildlife attest. We just wish we could be here in winter, when the elk are down. What a sight 8,000 elk must be grazing around almost 10,000 hectares of the refuge, sandwiched between the Tetons to the west and the mountains of the Bridger-Teton National Forest to the east.

When they're in residence, you can even do sleigh rides over the snow through the refuge, organised through the Jackson Hole Greater Yellowstone Visitor Centre, in Jackson.

The area is known as Jackson Hole, for it is a hole in the otherwise endless mountain ranges.
Back at Schwabacher Landing, the growing dawn still is agonisingly slow. But we know enough by now to see that it won't be the spectacular, sun-on-the-slopes experience we'd hoped for.

The hole and the lakes at the feet of the Tetons are blanketed in fog, which rises most of the way up the mountains, obscuring some of the most dramatic of the rock faces. It wafts across the mountains, too, obscuring all but their peaks, then clearing a little, like seeing them through a gauze veil. It hangs over the wetlands of the Teton Valley, creeks lacing the landscape, forest, scrub and grassland.

Sun on the peaks piercing through the clouds at the top also is dramatic. It's an intoxicating place.

Ranger Elsa and (dead) pals at Jenny Lake, at the feet of the Grand Tetons. Ranger Elsa was on hand to explain to us the details of the black wolf, the red fox and a grey wolf, as we recall.

IF YOU GO...

Grand Teton National Park (US National Parks Service) - www.nps.gov/grte <http://www.nps.gov/grte>
Bridger Teton National Forests - www.ohranger.com/bridger-teton-natl-forests <http://www.ohranger.com/bridger-teton-natl-forests>
National Elk Refuge - www.fws.gov/nationalelkrefuge/ <http://www.fws.gov/nationalelkrefuge/>
Wyoming Tourism - www.wyomingtourism.org <http://www.wyomingtourism.org>
Jackson Hole and Greater Yellowstone Visitor Center - www.fs.fed.us/jhgyvc/ <http://www.fs.fed.us/jhgyvc/>
Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce - www.jacksonholechamber.com <http://www.jacksonholechamber.com>

The writer travelled to Wyoming as a guest of United Airlines and Wyoming Tourism

Little house on the prairie.