In the little town of Wilson, Wyoming, at the base of Teton Pass, there are a few hours every morning and evening which offer an unrivaled exercise in reflexes and awareness. The main street, pretty much the only commercial street in town, is also Wyoming Highway 22, a two-lane scenic byway which connects Wyoming’s Jackson Hole valley to the much more expansive stretches of Idaho. Most days, thousands of cars stream down over the perilous, steep and winding Teton Pass—every morning and back again in the evening, driven by harried, often inattentive commuters who may live as close as 20 or as far as 90 miles away. They reluctantly slam on the brakes to meet the 25-mph speed limit in Wilson, besieged by signs about pedestrians and also moose crossing the road. Which means: Wilson sure looks cute, but much of the year, it feels like trying to traverse an exit off the Long Island Expressway into Queens on a Friday afternoon.
That all stopped abruptly on June 8, when Highway 22 suffered a “catastrophic failure.” The failure was indeed so catastrophic that traffic over the pass stopped completely, in both directions.
On a curve high up the pass, the pavement began to crack. A separate mudslide a few miles lower closed the road to traffic, which ended up being a good thing, actually, because then the crack site collapsed in a landslide, obliterating the road. It’s always hard in these situations to know for sure, but most surmised that the disasters happened because unusually warm temperatures from climate change led to rapid snowmelt and unstable mountainsides.
This rural mishap made national news. It was picked up by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, CNN and Fox News. It went international on the AP newswire. But Wilson was quiet. Slightly malevolently, as a Wilson resident in a minuscule rented cabin, I rejoiced: Perhaps Teton County, Wyoming, would have finally have to deal with the utterly foreseeable, wholly ignored, miserable socioeconomic problems of its creation.
If you have never been to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, let me pause here to explain a bit about it. The town of Jackson is an incredibly special place thanks to its proximity to the Teton Range, the Gros Ventre Range, Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, and its incredibly abundant wild animals. Much of this beauty and wildness exists today because of ardent conservation and anti-development efforts which began in the early 1900s, or barely more than a decade after the first white people claimed land in Jackson Hole (after the Shoshone people had been killed or chased away).
Bitter fights over what and how much to conserve ebbed and flowed over the decades, but today, significant conservation wins are why it’s still so beautiful, and why it draws millions of visitors from all over the globe—who mostly come from places where the wildness and beauty have long been destroyed by human development. Teton County is only part of the preserved ecosystem lands, but as it stands, 97 percent of the county is public land, and about 3 percent is developable.
It’s also got amazing skiing and climbing, biking and rafting. It’s a great place to hang out if you like the outdoors. And so over the past few decades, the population in the town of Jackson has grown a bit, but more recently, tourism and trophy-home construction have skyrocketed. Already a town that is used to absorbing tourists—at least 1.6 million came to visit and stayed in hotels in 2021—it now also plays host to second (or third, or fourth) homes, residences that spend most of the year empty, but also require armies of people commuting in to serve and maintain them, even when empty.
This trend only accelerated during COVID, when just about every pretty, rural place, famous or not, found itself in a land rush. Yet in Teton County, years of poor management of development and weak local government have made Jackson an increasingly unlivable place, putting it on the sharp end as the example of the direction of our country—a direction I might dramatize as an indication of a new, sad, neo-feudal, have-and-have-not landscape. And so, for those who moved to Jackson but can’t afford rising rents like $3,500 for a very basic 2-bedroom apartment, they can start commuting, or leave the region altogether.
For some, leaving a home, a community, and friends is hard, so they don’t go far, and they keep working in Jackson. That’s why the traffic backs up in my little town of Wilson so often—people have to cross over those mountains from Idaho, and there is just one direct road over which to pass, a road that rises 2,500 feet in just over 5 miles in order to do so. And then it collapsed in a landslide.
More than 40 percent of the people who work in Teton County can no longer afford to live there. To be clear, these aren’t all low-wage service employees who staff T-shirt shops or clean toilets in our county’s many, often vacant luxury mansions or pricey hotel rooms. It includes teachers and nurses, sheriffs’ deputies and doctors, air traffic controllers, wildlife biologists, mountain guides, and other seemingly integral parts of a functioning community. And when the pass closed, none of these people had a reliable way to get to work. The shortest way to navigate around the pass is over another, smaller pass, around a mountain range, and up a river canyon. It takes at least two hours each way—not exactly something you’d want to add to your life in lieu of a one-hour commute that most already considered miserable and stressful.
When the pass failed, many individual community members in Teton County stepped up, letting people stay in their homes or camp on their land instead of driving four hours a day. It was admirable, perhaps, but cold comfort for people with families and homes on the other side of the state line. Some businesses and organizations, such as the school district, bent over backward to help with gas money, extra pay, altered schedules, and support. Others simply advised employees to find alternate routes to work.
For anyone living in or commuting into Jackson, the calls for more affordable housing are so tiresome that I, and many other local residents I know, don’t even want to hear about it anymore. To us, the incessant loss of local homes and rentals to luxury redevelopers and short-term rentals (some legal and some illegal), or the demolition of entire blocks in town for luxury condos or hotels, feels more like a symptom of a much deeper rot in the socioeconomic fabric of Teton County.
For commuters, the pass is and has been miserable on a daily basis already. It’s something to be endured even when the road is fine, and dry. It’s been the symbol of a failed community for years: Here it closed for avalanches, or icy surfaces; now for an accident; or when large trucks lose their brakes on the hairy descent into Wilson, and crash into trees, or the gas station, or overturn and spill their cargo all over the road.
The Town of Jackson and Teton County have for years utterly failed to mitigate the predictable problems dropped into the community by the frenzied, roaring development. They hardly even manage the development, instead offering the space up as essentially a gold mine for developers, while fabricating a mythology around “sustainability and deed restricting a trivial number of houses for the growing workforce.
Teton County has the dubious privilege of being by far the most economically unequal county in the nation. For example according to IRS statistics, in 2021, 94 percent of the income was claimed by about 3,000 families, or 21 percent of county households. That total came to just over $9 billion in income—and it’s mostly untaxed investment income, at that. Developers say they are adding jobs when what they mean is low-wage tourism and service jobs—and even much better-paying jobs already aren’t enough money to live in town. Doctors (doctors!) can hardly buy homes in Teton County, much less your wildlife biologist or artist or EMT or anyone who gives life and energy and cares about a community.
That’s before you even consider why this place is famous. The extenuating circumstance that differentiates Teton County is the wildlife that live here and the ecosystem they are part of: The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem here and the Serengeti in Tanzania and Kenya are the only two mostly intact ecosystems left in the entire global temperate zone. Here, it’s because much of the Greater Yellowstone has been protected thanks to fierce fighting against mining and development interests since the 1870s. Prescient conservationists pushed for the protection of the landscape beginning with Yellowstone National Park, the second largest in the lower 48. This conservation is the reason why only 3 percent of land in Teton County is private and developable—the rest of it is preserved. With the pass a disaster zone, suddenly tourists—mostly hoping to see this very ecosystem and its wildlife—couldn’t arrive over the pretty byway into Jackson Hole.
“The real issue is there are limits to growth here,” says Luther Propst, a Teton County commissioner. “The difference with this community in this region is the federal government decided a long time ago we wanted this landscape managed to protect wild landscapes and animals. But instead we have intense traffic congestion, 45 percent of our community workforce lives elsewhere, and there is still tremendous pressure for more growth after years of electeds letting developers have their way.”
In general, Teton County had a tough start to June. The landslide was preceded by a huge mudslide in a different location on the pass. Raging river flows flipped a raft and stranded tourists on a scenic float on the Snake River, requiring rescue. In town, mortified planning board members wrote a letter to the editor of the Jackson Hole News and Guide, the local newspaper, about how the town’s current rules tied their hands in the latest development inquiry—because nothing in the rules said it wasn’t allowed, they were forced to approve Utah-based Mogul Capital‘s wildly inappropriate 366,000-plus-square-foot luxury hotel with two sublevels (right next to a creek and between two critical areas for wintering wildlife).
The local community, which mostly doesn’t show up anymore to protest development proposals, actually found it within them to rally in outrage. The town council and mayor meekly declared a temporary moratorium on large developments … for 90 days. You can bet Mogul is regrouping, and will come back when the ban is lifted.
Locals are exhausted. “I have real questions about why we can’t take a break from development when we have all these problems from current development we can’t solve,” a community member told me. They are a health care worker, and requested anonymity because of fear of repercussions in what is still a relatively small town. “I’ve watched our electeds for 20 years, and no matter what they say during their campaign, every time these projects come up, they just roll over. Everything gets approved, and if a developer doesn’t get what they want, they just sue, sue, sue,” they said.
As building and traffic intensify, human life gets more stressful. When our wild animals lose more habitat and migration corridors to development for tourists and homes, they die. Past votes show local support for wildlife, for example with the recent approval of $10 million in wildlife crossings under Highways 22 and 390, near Wilson. But already one side of that corridor is facing potential redevelopment: as employee housing for the ski resort, and a built-out public transit center right where the underpasses come out. That means the wildlife, in this case mainly elk, mule deer, and moose, will not use it, won’t be able to migrate, and maybe will suffer. So, in short, the effort will end up a colossal waste of money, and goodwill.
This is the way things are done here: make a good step, shoot the other foot. Build some great local affordable housing, then approve 200 trophy homes, ensuring the affordable housing hole is actually deeper than when you started. Or focus on employee housing, which means that when people lose or change jobs, they lose their tiny cubicle home, too!
“We’re fighting multiple proposals by people with [cumulative] billions, with donated money, and even though we are part of one of two intact ecosystems left, we are losing serious connectivity every day,” says Jenny Fitzgerald, a wildlife biologist and executive director of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance. “That fact is not felt by everyone who wants a piece of Jackson, because they can make a lot of money, and they don’t have a drop of care about the wildlife.”
The pass was never meant to be a corridor that propped up a community such as the one Jackson has become. As with many struggling resort towns, Teton County’s problems are human-caused. But here, it’s no longer possible for it to build out of its crisis; to do so would only further imperil the renowned ecosystem that is ostensibly the attraction—the heart of the only intact ecosystem in the temperate Western Hemisphere. It’s also worth noting the limitless demand for second homes here, which will always ensure a market and always keep prices high. When we cry about affordable housing without also demanding a building moratorium on bad projects that create slews of low-wage jobs and intensify traffic, it’s like merrily setting out to tame a forest fire with a watering can. Maybe we should all address the elephant in the room: Affordable housing is a Band-Aid, and what we have is a sucking chest wound called overdevelopment.
Sure, it’s a big lift to ask a part-time government who get paid less than lifeguards to be the vanguard solving the problems that poorly managed capitalism on a large scale has brought to their door. But it’s not impossible. After all, on June 28 the pass reopened, having been patched up in a temporary kind of way—by WYDOT contractors and federal dollars. It’s remarkable what can be achieved when someone in charge decides it is necessary.