Antelope Flats Road leads east to Mormon Row, where the Moulton Barn stands among the old homesteads with the Teton Range behind it, a view at its best at sunrise. The barn is reached by an out-and-back drive of about 1.8 miles each way, and a visit runs an hour or two. Homesteaders here dug deep wells and raised hay, and some of that hay still grows on the flats. Bison and pronghorn graze here from spring through fall, with coyotes and kestrels hunting the fields. Blacktail Ponds Overlook, just before the turn on the right side of the highway, looks over old beaver ponds and willows that can hold moose. Construction can close some buildings and parking at Mormon Row, and the road closes in winter.
Left is Antelope Flats Road, the way to Mormon Row, in about a third of a mile, just past Blacktail Ponds Overlook on your right. It's a mile and three quarters out to the Moulton barn and back the same way, so allow an hour or two. You'll turn left when you return to the highway. Some buildings and lots may be closed, so go by the signs out there. It's been called the most photographed barn in the West, with the Teton Range behind it at sunrise, and it took one homesteader twenty-six years, from nineteen thirteen to nineteen thirty-nine. John Woodward, with a wife and nine children on the same row, dug ninety-eight feet for water. The rough town in the movie Shane stood on these flats, and it's long gone. In nineteen sixty-three Henry Fonda came up the valley to make a movie, and the hysteria ran so high that someone wrote, Henry Fonda milked a cow in the Moulton Barn. Bison and pronghorn graze out there now. The homesteaders are gone. Some of the grass out there is still their hay.
Photo: Eric Kilby / Wikimedia Commons / "Moulton Barn and Cloudy Tetons" (cropped) · CC BY-SA 4.0