Grand Teton National Park

Clifford P. Hansen, a cattle rancher who became Wyoming's governor and then served two terms as a U.S. senator, has died. He was 97. Hansen died at his home Tuesday after receiving hospital treatment for a broken pelvis. A Republican, he served as governor from 1963 to 1967, when he went to Washington after defeating Teno Roncalio, Wyoming's only congressman and a Democrat, in a bid for the Senate. Hansen sat on the Senate Finance and Veterans Affairs committees and was a ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee.

The rain poured down all night as if it would never stop. The lightning flashed and the thunder crashed. We didn't mind, not even when the power went out. We were snug in our log cabin in the middle of Grand Teton National Park, wondering how all the animals, not to mention campers, were faring in the storm. Even the kids were glad we'd chosen a cabin that night rather than a tent. The next morning, with the rain gone, they couldn't get outside fast enough.

A cool gust of wind greets Ashley Alexander and Natalia Tucker, both 15, as they step from the small propeller plane, still queasy from the bumpy ride. It's their first day of camp. They have earned their way here, this trip to Teton Science School in Kelly, Wyo., from their native Los Angeles because they have chosen to do well when others around them have chosen a more slippery path.

President Clinton says he's not likely to score many political points by vacationing in sparsely populated Wyoming. The President is westward bound because he's a self-proclaimed "big national park person." "Since I've been President, I've not been to any national parks," Clinton told reporters who wondered why he had chosen to vacation in Wyoming. "From the time I was a young man, old enough to drive around, I visited national parks."

There comes the moment when Kenny says to me: "Just do it, man. It's nothing. Go as fast as you can and straight up. It'll be OK. Hardly anybody ever gets hurt." So here I am, Mr. Hardly Anybody, riding a combustion engine to my death in the jagged mountains south of Yellowstone National Park, whizzing down a steep slope into a little creek bed and up the other side to a point where the slope becomes a vertical cornice.

The sophisticated motion sensors that line a one-mile stretch of highway in western Wyoming seem out of place. There are no pricey jewels, no rare artifacts, just desolate landscape. The equipment is here because every fall and spring, 300 to 450 pronghorn antelope cross the bustling two-lane road on their journey between the snowcapped mountains in Grand Teton National Park and the expansive, sagebrush-covered mesas and hills of southwestern Wyoming. The journey extends about 160 miles; of all the mammals in the Western Hemisphere, only the Arctic caribou migrates farther.

The bodies of two climbers who apparently fell to their deaths on Grand Teton were recovered with the help of a helicopter, a park official said. "They were roped together," Grand Teton National Park spokeswoman Jackie Skaggs said. "We still don't know what happened and how it happened." The two dead climbers were identified as Alan Rooney, 38, and Jonathan Morrow, 28.

THE Grand Tetons held sway over me for 20 years -- before I set ever eyes on them. The breathtaking backdrop for a mythic American landscape has been etched on my consciousness since, as a 10-year-old, I sat mesmerized by a Saturday matinee showing of "Shane," an archetypal little-guy-versus-bully story. And the Jackson Hole, Wyo., landscape, personified by the overpowering Tetons, is as essential a character as any in the 1953 film.

When Jeff Olsen first attempted to ride a mountain bike in Grand Canyon National Park in 1990, he was denied access. "It didn't make any sense to me," says the architect and bikeway designer from Sarasota Springs, N.Y. So he pushed for the creation of a 70-mile paved path on the rim -- still under construction -- part of which is open to cyclists. "It's been a very uphill battle with a lot of frustration and institutional obstacles," he says.

A series of earthquakes shook the northwest part of the state near Grand Teton National Park, but there were no reports of damage. The strongest quake, at 12:51 a.m., registered a magnitude of 5.0 and was centered about 19 miles east-northeast of Jackson, said John Minsch, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo.