With a lack of foothills in the park it looks like the peaks shoot 7,000 feet right out of the valley, but they’re further than they look. The name comes from 19th century French fur trappers who called them "les trois tétons" (meaning "the three breasts" or "teats") because of the three sections of the mountains. Before that the Shoshone people called it "Teewinot" which translates to "many pinnacles". Calling the area the Grand Tetons was normalized by mapmakers later.

While only 27 native tribes are registered federally to the Yellowstone area, more than 50 have called this area home for thousands of years before the Hayden expedition. The oldest sites can be tracked to about 11,000 years ago, though humans very well could have been in the area for as long as 15,000 years ago. When the last period of ice coverage, glaciers, melted they carved out mountains, rivers, and valleys that humans could then follow, along with the animals moving