The Tetons look wrong in photographs and the reason is that they have no foothills. Most ranges introduce themselves gradually, with rising ground that prepares your eye for the summits. This one comes straight up off the floor of Jackson Hole in a single move of roughly 7,000 feet, because the valley and the range are two sides of the same fault: the mountains are the block that rose, the valley is the block that dropped.

They are also young. As mountain ranges go the Tetons are among the newest in North America, which is why they are still sharp. Time rounds mountains off, and these have not had much of it. The jagged profile you are looking at is a range that has not finished being built.

A beaver pond is an unglamorous foreground for something that dramatic, and that is precisely why it works. Still water does not care what it reflects. It gives you the range twice, once in rock and once in a surface an animal built, and the pond will be gone within a few years while the peaks will not.