These beautiful photos were taken by Jackie Skaggs, public affairs officer for Grand Teton National Park.
She snapped the pictures from the park’s headquarters in Moose, Wyoming.
Skaggs said of the spectacular sight,
It was the most unusual cloud formation (a lenticular cloud for the most part) and lasting (but constantly changing) cloud display that I have ever witnessed over the Grand Teton in nearly 40 years of living in Jackson Hole. Often, it looked like Niagara Falls, and then it would appear to be a huge bird with outstretched wispy wings and its beak just touching the top of the Grand.
Because of their often circular shape, lenticular clouds have sometimes been mistaken for UFOs.
Here are some more examples of this type of cloud formation.
Above Skaftafell glacier in Iceland.
Above the northern Presidential Range in New Hampshire.
Lenticular cloud rings above Mt. Jefferson in Oregon.
That last picture of the cloud rings over Mt. Jefferson reminds me of something you might see in a science fiction movie.
Have you ever seen anything like this before?