40 Fun Facts About Jackson Hole

In Rocky IV, a Jackson Hole farm and the snowy Tetons stood in for which country?

Soviet Union training scenes were really shot in and around Grand Teton National Park, so the frozen Russia on screen is Wyoming. The film's other locations were Philadelphia and Vancouver.

Grand Teton is the only US national park with which facility, serving Jackson Hole, inside its boundaries?

A commercial airport sits inside the park because the runway came first: it dates from the 1930s and was absorbed when the park grew in 1950. The terminal is capped at 18 feet high to keep it out of the view.

Which rapper's 2018 album cover is his own iPhone photo of the Teton Range, taken hours before release?

Kanye West made the album Ye while living in Jackson Hole and premiered it at a listening party there. Five albums he produced in those weeks are known as the Wyoming Sessions.

Which actor, a longtime Jackson rancher, has flown his own helicopter on Teton County search-and-rescue missions?

Harrison Ford once recovered a lost hiker who was sick into a rescuer's cap and only later learned who her pilot was. He has given about half of his 800-acre ranch over as a nature reserve.

What made the town government that Jackson, Wyoming elected in 1920 a national curiosity?

Every member was a woman: the mayor and the whole council, who then appointed women as town marshal, clerk and treasurer. Wyoming had been first to give women the vote, half a century earlier.

Jackson Hole landed the Federal Reserve's yearly symposium partly because chairman Paul Volcker loved which pastime?

Fly fishing drew the avid angler to Jackson Lake Lodge in 1982, and the lodge has been the symposium's home ever since. Central bankers and officials from some 70 countries have attended.

The name Grand Teton, usually explained as meaning 'large breast', comes from which language?

French voyageurs are said to have named the range les trois tétons, the three breasts. A rival theory credits the Teton Sioux, who lived about 200 miles away in the Dakotas.

Which kind of animal was 399, the Grand Teton celebrity trailed by dozens of photographers until her death in 2024?

Grizzly bear 399 got her name as the 399th of her kind that researchers fitted with a radio collar. She lived unusually close to people, taught her cubs to look both ways at roads, and reached 28.

Which photographer's 1942 picture of the Tetons and the Snake River was sent into space on the Voyager probes?

Ansel Adams's black-and-white view was encoded on the Voyager Golden Record, so it is now travelling through interstellar space. A mural-sized print sold for $988,000 in 2020.

Which youth organization began the tradition of gathering shed antlers on the National Elk Refuge to auction in Jackson?

Boy Scouts have done the job since 1968, and the renamed Scouting America still runs the yearly auction. Three-quarters of the money goes back to the refuge, where it pays to irrigate the grass the herd eats.

Which famous family's heir bought up Jackson Hole ranches through the Snake River Land Company to donate as parkland?

Rockefeller money bought more than 30,000 acres, but Congress stalled the gift for years. In 1942 he threatened to sell the land off, which finally forced Washington to act.

Which president created Jackson Hole National Monument during World War II, then vetoed a bill to abolish it?

Franklin Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act to act without Congress, which outraged local ranchers. Since 1950 any new national monument in Wyoming has needed the consent of Congress.

The Snake River threads the length of Jackson Hole before becoming the largest tributary of which river?

Columbia water owes a lot to the Snake, which supplies about a fifth of the bigger river's flow to the Pacific. The Snake rises in Yellowstone and runs about 1,080 miles.

Teton Pass, the steep highway out of Jackson Hole beyond Wilson, leads drivers into which neighboring state?

Idaho commuters use the pass daily, so when a section of the road collapsed in June 2024 they faced a detour of more than 60 miles. It reopened within three weeks.

Which future Western legend had his first leading role in The Big Trail, a 1930 epic filmed partly around Jackson?

John Wayne was only 23, and the film flopped so badly that he spent the rest of the decade in low-budget Westerns. Stagecoach finally made him a star in 1939.

Which post-apocalyptic video game series, later an HBO drama, makes Jackson, Wyoming home to a community of survivors?

The Last of Us put Jackson on the map for gamers, yet the TV version never filmed there: the Canadian town of Canmore, Alberta, doubled for it on screen.

John Colter, the first European-American known to see Jackson Hole, had earlier explored under whose command?

Lewis and Clark let him leave two months early, in 1806, so he could head back into the Rockies instead of going home. He reached Jackson Hole in the winter of 1807-08, on a trek of more than 500 miles.

Nick Wilson, founder of the Jackson Hole town of Wilson, had earlier ridden for which short-lived mail service?

Pony Express riding was only one chapter: as a child he ran away and lived with the Shoshone, where Chief Washakie's family adopted him. He told the story in a memoir published in 1910.

Which animal, the fastest land mammal in the Americas, migrates into Jackson Hole each year from the Green River basin?

Pronghorn can reach 55 miles an hour, a speed built for outrunning predators. Their seasonal trek is even longer than that of the Yellowstone elk that winter near Jackson.

Which animal, hunted almost to extinction in the 1800s, now winters in a large herd on the National Elk Refuge?

Bison share the refuge each winter with an average of 7,500 elk. Its lower elevation and milder climate draw animals down from the high country around Jackson.

Celebrities are often said to pick Jackson Hole for second homes because Wyoming, unlike most states, lacks which levy?

Income tax is not charged on individuals or on companies in Wyoming. A 2019 Bloomberg study ranked Teton County first in the nation for average earnings per person.

Jackson Hole is named after Davy Jackson, who worked there in the late 1820s in which trade?

Fur trapping for beaver made him one of the first outsiders to spend a whole winter there. Mountain men like him called any high valley ringed by peaks a hole.

Jackson, Wyoming has recorded a frost on every calendar date except one, which falls in which month?

July 25 is the only date that has never seen freezing weather in the town's records. Jackson sits at 6,237 feet, and that elevation makes for big swings between day and night.

Which 1953 Western about a mysterious gunfighter was filmed beneath the Tetons on sets built in Jackson Hole?

Shane won the Academy Award for color cinematography, with the Grand Teton massif looming in many shots. Its frontier town and homestead were built for the shoot and demolished afterwards.

Which ski hill on the edge of downtown Jackson, known to locals as the Town Hill, was Wyoming's first ski area?

Snow King got its first chairlift in 1946 by recycling an ore tram from Salida, Colorado, with single seats hung where the ore cars had been. It took its present name in 1938.

Which Jackson Hole ski run, entered by dropping off a cornice between rock walls, has been called America's scariest?

Corbet's Couloir is named for guide Barry Corbet, who spotted the chute and predicted that someone would ski it one day. Patroller Lonnie Ball did, in 1967.

The bar added to Jackson's historic Wort Hotel in 1950 has 2,032 of which objects set into its surface?

Silver dollars, all uncirculated, give the Silver Dollar Bar its name. Illegal gambling was long tolerated at the hotel, and after a 1950s crackdown it retreated to a basement room known as the Snake Pit.

Which bird, the heaviest native to North America, can be found along Flat Creek on the National Elk Refuge?

Trumpeter swan wingspans can pass ten feet, and the species is the largest waterfowl alive. Flat Creek carries on out of the refuge and straight through the town of Jackson.

Which Grand Teton beauty spot is named for the Shoshone wife of English frontiersman Richard 'Beaver Dick' Leigh?

Jenny Lake remembers a family tragedy: she and the couple's six children all died of smallpox in 1876. Nearby Leigh Lake is named for her husband.

The Tetons rise straight from Jackson Hole with no foothills because of which feature at the range's base?

A fault line runs along the foot of the range: one block rose into the peaks while the other dropped to form the valley. The Tetons are the youngest mountains in the Rockies.

The JY, opened beside Phelps Lake in 1908, was Jackson Hole's first example of which kind of tourist business?

Dude ranch stays let city visitors live the cowboy life for a fee, and the valley soon had many. One early JY guest was Owen Wister, author of The Virginian.

The much-photographed Moulton barn stands on a Grand Teton lane named for homesteaders of which faith?

Mormon families arriving from the 1890s clustered their farms along one road, unlike the scattered homesteads usual in Jackson Hole. They established twenty-seven homesteads there.

Which Jackson Hole town was swept away in 1927 when the natural dam left by the Gros Ventre landslide failed?

Kelly lost all but its church and schoolhouse to a flood six feet deep. Engineers had judged the two-year-old dam safe, but a wet spring sent the lake over the top.

Exum, a Teton company dating from about 1930, is the oldest in North America in which line of work?

Mountain guiding the Exum way meant teaching clients to climb for themselves, where European guides of the day pulled them up on a rope. Co-founder Glenn Exum was a music student at the time.

Grand Teton is only Wyoming's second-highest mountain; which Wind River Range summit tops it by 35 feet?

Gannett Peak sits deep in remote wilderness, and climbers rank it among the hardest state high points to reach, behind Alaska's Denali. It stands 13,810 feet high.

Which Jackson Hole resident, dubbed the grandmother of the conservation movement, won the Presidential Medal of Freedom?

Mardy Murie and her husband Olaus made their ranch at Moose a base for the Wilderness Society, and she helped win passage of the Wilderness Act. The ranch is now a National Historic Landmark.

Which service club's local chapter built the first elk-antler arch on Jackson's Town Square, in 1953?

Rotary members put up the first arch at the southwest corner, and the other three corners followed in the 1960s. The arches are periodically rebuilt with antlers gathered on the nearby refuge.

The National Museum of Wildlife Art near Jackson was designed to echo a ruined castle in which country?

Scotland's Slains Castle, in Aberdeenshire, inspired the rough stone building, which is set on a bluff so that it blends with the hillside behind it. It looks out over the National Elk Refuge.

What powered Menor's Ferry, the pontoon that carried wagons across the Snake River at Moose from the 1890s?

The current itself did the work, pushing the pontoon along a cable stretched from bank to bank. The Park Service has restored the ferry to working order.

Olympic slalom champion Pepi Stiegler, Jackson Hole's first ski school director, came from which Alpine country?

Austria's Stiegler had won slalom gold at Innsbruck in 1964, beating two Americans to do it, and was hired the following year. He stayed with the resort for 37 years.