The Grand Teton National Park Stamp

Where Grand Teton is

Grand Teton, for people who count parks

The 1929 park was the mountains only. Signed February 26, 1929, at 96,000 acres, covering the peaks and six lakes at their base, all carved from land the government already owned. The valley floor of Jackson Hole was left out. That was about half the park you can visit today.

Rockefeller bought the valley under a false name. He visited in 1926 with Yellowstone's superintendent, who lobbied him hard, and in 1927 formed the Snake River Land Company specifically so that sellers would not raise their prices on a Rockefeller. The local banker hired to negotiate did not know who he was working for. When it went public in 1930 the valley was furious. Congressional hearings in Jackson in 1933 found most accusations of coercion untrue, though the Park Service had been aggressive with homesteaders lacking clear title.

Congress refused the gift for over a decade. By 1942 Rockefeller issued an ultimatum: take the land or he would sell it off. On March 15, 1943, Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act to create Jackson Hole National Monument by proclamation, no vote required. Four days later a Wyoming congressman introduced a bill to abolish it. Ranchers, including a future governor and the actor Wallace Beery, drove cattle across monument land without permits in protest. The Park Service ignored them. Roosevelt pocket-vetoed the abolition bill in December 1944, and Congress retaliated by refusing to fund the monument at all for years.

The 1950 compromise is why Wyoming is different. Truman signed the merger on September 14, 1950, producing today's roughly 310,000-acre park. The deal compensated Teton County for lost taxes and grandfathered grazing rights. It also barred any future national park or monument in Wyoming without express congressional authorization. Wyoming remains the only state exempt from the Antiquities Act.

Why there are no foothills. The Tetons are the youngest range in the Rockies, and the mechanism is unusual: the valley is dropping faster than the range is rising. Each major earthquake on the Teton fault moves about ten feet total, two to three feet up on the west side and four to six feet down on the east. Nothing transitional accumulates, so the peaks come straight off flat sagebrush. The rock itself is ancient even though the range is not, with gneiss more than 2.7 billion years old.

Official Grand Teton park site (nps.gov)

What lives in Grand Teton

Grizzly 399. Born in 1996, collared in 2001 as the 399th bear in a long-running study, which is where the number came from. She produced at least 22 cubs and grandcubs, usually triplets. In May 2020 she came out of hibernation with four, which is what made her famous well beyond Wyoming. At her death she was the oldest known reproducing female grizzly in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. She was killed by a vehicle on October 22, 2024, on the highway south of Jackson, outside the park. A yearling cub was with her and survived. Between 2009 and 2023, 49 grizzlies died in vehicle collisions in this ecosystem.

Pronghorn, on a migration older than agriculture. They travel about 150 miles each way between Jackson Hole and the Upper Green River Valley, with some animals of the herd covering more than 200. Archaeology at Trapper's Point shows roughly 6,000 years of continuous use of the same route. In 2008 the Forest Service designated 45 miles of it the first federally recognized wildlife migration corridor in the country. Without it, pronghorn would disappear from Grand Teton entirely, because they cannot survive the valley's winters.

The elk refuge next door. The National Elk Refuge was established in 1912, sits immediately south of the park, and holds around 7,500 elk each winter plus more than a thousand bison, the largest single bison herd under federal management. A century-old supplemental feeding program is being phased down because concentrating that many animals spreads brucellosis and chronic wasting disease.

Wolves let themselves in. They were not reintroduced here. They walked down from Yellowstone after the 1995 releases and recolonized on their own.

The Grand Teton designs

Snake River Overlook

Where Ansel Adams made "The Tetons and the Snake River" in 1942, the river bending through the foreground and the peaks behind. You cannot take that photograph anymore. The Park Service says so on its own page: the trees have grown and the exact spot is not known. The image was encoded onto the Voyager Golden Record and is currently in interstellar space on two spacecraft. A print sold for $988,000 in 2020.

Mormon Row

Two weathered barns on open sagebrush flats with the Teton wall rising directly behind them, unobstructed. LDS families arrived from Idaho in the 1890s and, following settlement doctrine, clustered their homesteads in a row rather than scattering them the way everyone else in Jackson Hole did. Hence the name. Of about 27 original homesteads, six clusters survive.

Jenny Lake

Formed about 12,000 years ago when a glacier coming out of Cascade Canyon pushed a pile of rock ahead of itself and then melted, leaving the debris as a dam. Roughly 1,191 acres and 256 feet deep. It was named by the 1872 Hayden Expedition for Jenny, a Shoshone woman married to the trapper who guided the survey. She and their six children died of smallpox four years later.

How to record your Grand Teton visit

Grand Teton, asked and answered