Ansel Adams's 1942 photograph of the Snake River curving through Jackson Hole below the Teton Range, storm clouds over the peaks
Ansel Adams / public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Wyoming · Region

Jackson Hole & the Tetons

Summer country for five nations, the 1920 town council of women, the valley Rockefeller bought through a front company, and the peaks that rise with no foothills at all.

6 places to explore

Jackson Hole was summer country. The Shoshone, Bannock, Crow, Blackfeet and Gros Ventre came over the passes to hunt and gather and left before winter shut the valley. The fur trappers named it for one of their own, David Jackson, and the town took the name in 1894. On May 11, 1920, Jackson elected a mayor and four council members who were all women; the new council appointed women as town marshal, clerk and treasurer, and Rose Crabtree won her seat by outpolling her own husband.

Congress made the peaks a national park in 1929 but left the valley floor out after ranchers objected. John D. Rockefeller Jr. had already begun buying the valley in 1927 through the Snake River Land Company, a Utah corporation that hid both his name and his plan to give the land to the park. When the truth came out the valley turned against it, and Congress would not enlarge the park. On March 15, 1943, Franklin Roosevelt went around Congress and proclaimed 221,000 acres the Jackson Hole National Monument. The fight ended on September 14, 1950, when the park, the monument and Rockefeller's donated land were merged into one Grand Teton National Park, at a price written into the law: no president may proclaim another national monument in Wyoming without the consent of Congress.

The Tetons stand about seven thousand feet above the valley with no foothills between, because for roughly the last ten million years the range has been rising along the Teton fault while the floor of Jackson Hole drops. The Grand Teton tops out at 13,775 feet.

What to See in Jackson Hole & the Tetons

6 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Geology & Rock Formations

The bare scar of the Gros Ventre Slide running down the face of Sheep Mountain through dark forest, yellow aspens in the valley below

Gros Ventre Slide

Kelly

The north face of Sheep Mountain fell into the river in 1925; the dam it made held two years, then emptied onto the town of Kelly.

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Natural Areas

Bull elk standing along a snowy ridge on the National Elk Refuge, sagebrush poking through the snow and white peaks behind

National Elk Refuge

Jackson

Stephen Leek's photographs of starving elk built this winter refuge in 1912; a century of hay feeding is now its hardest question.

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Historic Sites

The Cunningham Cabin, a low sod-roofed log building of two rooms joined by an open passage, on sagebrush flats with the Teton Range behind

Cunningham Cabin

Moran

An 1888 dog-trot homestead cabin where a posse shot two men in 1893, and the valley decided not to talk about it.

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A weathered gambrel-roofed Moulton barn on Mormon Row, snowy Teton peaks half hidden in cloud behind it

Mormon Row Historic District

Moose

A Latter-day Saint farm village on Antelope Flats, its ditches still running and the Moulton barns still standing against the Tetons.

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A log cabin at the Murie Ranch set back in tall grass among yellow aspens and dark spruce

Murie Ranch

Moose

The porch where the Wilderness Act was argued into being; Olaus Murie died a year before it passed, and Mardy kept going for forty more.

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A carved wooden sign at the summit of Teton Pass reading Howdy Stranger, Yonder Is Jackson Hole, with the pass elevation of 8,431 feet beneath it and the valley spread out below

Teton Pass

Wilson

The trail the Astorians crossed in 1811, the six wagons of 1889, the highway of 1969, and the hairpin that slid off the mountain in 2024.

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Scenic Drives through Jackson Hole & the Tetons

Scenic Byway

Teton Park Road: Jackson to Moran

Up the valley under the Tetons: Bill Menor's ferry and Maud Noble's chapel at Moose, the lake named for a Newe woman, and the dam that made Jackson Lake a reservoir for Idaho.

37 mi · 1.5 hrs
Scenic Byway

WY-22 and ID-33: Teton Pass to Teton Valley

The only paved road over the Teton Range: up a ten percent grade from Wilson, past the hairpin that slid off the mountain in 2024, and down into the old Pierre's Hole on the back side of the peaks.

33 mi · 1 hrs

Stories from Jackson Hole & the Tetons

History

The Argument at the Top of the Grand

Two survey men said they reached the summit of the Grand Teton in 1872. A Laramie surveyor said they had not, climbed it himself in 1898, and spent thirty years making the state agree.

4 min read

Jackson Hole & the Tetons rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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