Road Trip Yellowstone

by Dina Mishev

  SEÑOR LOPEZ

  Most of the subjects in wildlife art are unknown. “We don’t often know who that moose in a painting is,” says National Museum of Wildlife Art curator Adam Harris. But we do know the jaguar in two of Anna Vaugh Hyatt Huntington’s sculptures in the National Museum of Wildlife Art’s permanent collection. He is “Señor Lopez.” Señor Lopez was brought to the New York Zoological Society (now the Bronx Zoo) in 1902. “Knowing who an animal was can add a whole other level of interest and interpretation,” Harris says. For instance, we know that, while sailing to the United States, Señor Lopez had a mouth infection of some sort. His handlers treated this by rubbing cocaine on the sore area.

  Arriving safely in New York, Señor Lopez was installed in an area of the zoo that had access to a room with large panes of glass purpose-built to allow artists to study the animals on the other side. Huntington spent hours observing Señor Lopez before sculpting him.

  Jackson Hole Fall Arts Festival

  Well into the 1980s, it was a bush that heralded the beginning and end of the season for Jackson Hole’s art galleries. You can still see it today. Stand on the southeast corner of Jackson’s Town Square and look up to the northwest until your eyes hit the only bush on a hillside of grass and sage. That’s it. When this bush’s leaves began changing color (into a brilliant red) and falling off, usually around Labor Day, the galleries in town knew summer crowds would soon follow. So they closed their doors until the leaves—and visitors—came back around Memorial Day.

  There weren’t nearly as many art galleries in Jackson in the early 1980s as there are now, but the handful that existed outnumbered all other retail establishments combined. So when the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce made it their mission to extend the town’s tourist season beyond June, July, and August, it was reasonable that they looked at what they might do with art. The first Jackson Hole Fall Arts Festival was held in September 1985.

  In the ensuing years, the fall arts festival, always held in mid-September, has become one of the busiest times of year in the valley, and it is one of the largest, most diverse festivals of its kind in the country. For 2 weeks, there are concerts, special gallery shows, a fashion show, auctions, street fairs, food events, a design conference, ranch tours, and artists-in-residence. jacksonholechamber.com

  ROAD TRIP 4 DOWNTOWN JACKSON

  Jackson is the largest town—it’s the only official town actually—in the valley of Jackson Hole. Jackson is different things to different visitors. It’s a throwback to the Wild West, a center for western and wildlife art, or a place to get good food. Chances are that whatever you’re looking for (unless it’s a Prada or Gucci store—Jackson is really trying not to become another Aspen), Jackson has it.

  Elk Antler Arches

  It’s a toss-up whether the Tetons or the elk antler arches at the four corners of Jackson’s Town Square are more photographed by visitors. When the local Rotary Club erected the first arch in 1953, it had no idea it was creating an icon. But the arch was an instant hit with visitors, so the club started planning for additional arches, one on each corner. These were built between 1966 and 1969. (The southwest corner was the first to get its arch.)

  Today’s arches are not the original ones though. Elk antlers have a lifespan. “They were starting to decompose,” says Rotarian Pete Karns. “People could and did steal individual antlers because they weren’t secure anymore.” Karns, whose grandfather homesteaded in Jackson in 1890, also realized the arches were becoming a safety hazard. Kids, and adults, climb on them. But “a Jackson Hole without its arches could never exist,” he says. In 2006, Karns turned to the valley’s three Rotary clubs to fund raise money to replace all four arches. Even the youngest arch looked pretty dingy. “They don’t look very good when they’re old,” Karns says. Ideally, the antlers should be replaced every 30 to 40 years.

  The oldest arch, the southwest one, was rebuilt first in 2007. Because this arch is the most popular one for photographs, it wasn’t just replaced, but also moved. It was only a matter of time before someone walking backward to take a photo stepped into traffic and was hurt. The southeast arch was redone in 2009, the northeast corner in 2011, and the northwest one in 2013. Each time, workers disassembled the old arch just after Memorial Day and had the new one up by the Fourth of July.

  Making an elk antler arch is a labor-intensive process. Workers weave antlers—each of which weighs from 5 to 10 pounds—together around the steel frame. Antlers go up one at a time. By the time an arch is done, it’s a mosaic of 10,000 to 12,000 pounds of antlers. Some of them are screwed down to add extra support and prevent vandalism. About 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of the antlers in each arch came from the Jackson Hole Boy Scouts, who pick them up on the National Elk Refuge each year. The rest were bought from antler dealers in the Mountain West. The new arches should be good until 2040 or so.

  WOODEN SIDEWALKS

  The wooden sidewalks around Jackson might be just for show today, but that wasn’t always the case. Like most western towns in the early 1900s, Jackson was often mired in mud or worse (remember, horses were the main mode of transportation then). In 1920, Jackson elected the country’s first all-female municipal government. These women quickly found funds to build the town’s first sidewalks out of wood rather than concrete.

  LOCAL LOWDOWN MARK “FISH” FISHMAN, DJ for KMTN/Jackson Hole

  In 1989, Mark “Fish” Fishman moved to Jackson Hole for a summer. The plan was to then return home to Atlanta, marry his college girlfriend, and then go into the restaurant world or maybe work for CNN. “But I wasn’t going to be an on-air guy,” he says. Fish is still here, and he is definitely an “on-air guy.” His voice has been a constant at KMTN (96.9 FM) almost since he arrived. He started at the station—he did the overnight shift the same day he was hired, which was also the same day he interviewed for the job—several months after moving here. Then he did afternoons for several years while working in different restaurants. (At one point, he was assistant food and beverage manager at Spring Creek Ranch.) In 1996, Fish became the station’s program director and switched to doing the weekday morning show, which includes the iconic Trash & Treasure segment, where listeners can call and sell (or give away) almost anything.

  Q: How do you describe Trash & Treasure?

  MARK FISHMAN: It’s the original Craigslist.

  Q: Have you ever bought anything on Trash & Treasure?

  MF: My first summer here I bought a bike.

  Q: You’ve hosted T&T forever. How many other hosts have there been?

  MF: More people have walked on the moon than hosted Trash & Treasure. There have only been three of us. Before me there was Brad Brown and Russ Graham.

  Q: When did you become “Fish”?

  MF: The earliest I remember being called Fish by everyone was third grade. And then in 1979, my mom remarried, to a guy named Mark. So from that point, the family always called me Fish. I’m Uncle Fish. My mom calls me Fish.

  Q: Is there a “Fish” personality?

  MF: I’m always just being me and I often get the comment from people when they meet me, “Oh, you’re just like you are on the radio.” I don’t try to be “the radio guy.” I think listeners like being talked to, not talked at.

  Q: Would you ever give up being on the air?

  MF: No. It is my tie to the community. Some people fish, or bike, or hike, or ski every day. That is their Jackson Hole thing. As much as I love those things, the ties I’ve developed to the community through being on the air—that’s my Jackson Hole thing.

  WORT HOTEL

  Jackson’s only National Historic Hotel of America, the Wort opened in 1941 when downtown’s streets were still dirt and cowboys were king. The dirt is long gone, but little else has changed on this hotel’s exterior, including the red rock trim the Wort brothers quarried themselves in the Gros Ventre Mountains bordering the east side of the valley. Inside the hotel’s Silver Dollar Bar, hundreds of uncirculated silver dollar coins are inlaid into the wo
oden bar top. worthotel.com

  LOCAL LOWDOWN ALI AND KEVIN COHANE, Founders and Owners of Picnic and Persephone Bakery Café

  Kevin Cohane took his first kitchen job in the valley—at Blue Lion in 2003—so he could spend his days skiing. Having studied biology and taken a fair amount of chemistry in college, the Connecticut native quickly became attracted to the precision and science of baking. Baking didn’t give him the rush skiing did, but he liked the challenge.

  In 2007, he put skiing on hold to move to Paris to spend a year studying pastry at Le Cordon Bleu culinary school. Back stateside, he spent 2 years practicing what he had learned at Fox & Obel bakery in Chicago’s Streeterville. Eventually he and then-fiancée Ali “really wanted to get something of our own going,” he says. They found a 1,700-square-foot location where they could make breads and pastries for wholesale. Persephone Bakery was born.

  Ali, who is trained in graphic design, always wanted a retail space. It took the 30-somethings a couple of years, but they eventually found the perfect spot, which Ali describes as a “tiny, cozy cabin that, because it’s a bit beaten up, has tons of character.” The location isn’t bad either: It’s one block east of the Town Square.

  While Kevin concentrated on making the best croissants outside of Paris, Ali worked hard to establish a “cute, French vintage bakery” vibe inside Persephone Bakery Café.

  Walking into the cabin, the first thing you’ll notice—after the marble counter overflowing with baked goods—is the wall covered with wooden spoons. “We built Persephone on a budget, and I was trying to come up with something that could fill a big wall but not be super expensive,” she says. “Initially we were going to do it with vintage rolling pins, and I soon realized they would be a nightmare to hang. I found a wholesaler of wooden spoons and was excited that since they were all the same I could create a cool graphic. I had to tape them all to the wall three separate times before I got it right.” persephonebakery.com

  PERSEPHONE’S OATMEAL, CRANBERRY, TOFFEE COOKIES

  MAKES 16 COOKIES

  INGREDIENTS

  12.3 ounces unsalted butter

  13.4 ounces brown sugar

  2 large eggs

  ¾ teaspoon vanilla extract

  10.2 ounces all-purpose flour

  1 teaspoon baking soda

  1 teaspoon iodized salt

  ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

  13 ounces regular oats

  12.5 ounces Craisins

  5 ounces toffee pieces

  INSTRUCTIONS

  Cream butter and sugar until combined.

  Stream in egg and vanilla.

  Add flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon. Mix until dough just comes together.

  Add oats, Craisins, and toffee. Mix until evenly dispersed.

  Bake in a convection oven at 350 degrees for 18 minutes.

  ROAD TRIP 5 PUBLIC LANDS

  Almost as soon as you exit Yellowstone to the south, you’re in Grand Teton National Park. The Tetons, the heart of the park, dominate Jackson Hole, but these mountains and the national park that protects them are only a small fraction of Jackson Hole’s public lands. Jackson Hole has the Bridger-Teton National Forest, the National Elk Refuge, and the Gros Ventre and Jedediah Smith Wilderness Areas. All told, 97 percent of the land in Jackson Hole is protected in some way.

  Teton Crest Trail

  It’s arguable there are more scenic backpacking adventures to be had in Jackson Hole than the Teton Crest Trail, but this would be a difficult argument to win. The Crest Trail runs upwards of 40 miles close to the crest of the range. In its entirety, it ascends four passes, traverses the Death Canyon Shelf, crosses Alaska Basin, and skirts Marion, Sunset, and Holly Lakes and Lake Solitude. The trail’s average elevation is 10,000 feet.

  Fritiof Fryxell, a geologist, climber, and Grand Teton National Park’s first naturalist from 1929 to 1934, was the first person to envision a single trail running the length of the range. His earliest notes about it, in 1929, to park superintendent Samuel Woodring, described it as “a summit route tying together all of the proposed canyon feeder trails.” That summer, Woodring, as excited at the prospect of this trail as Fryxell, led a small group on horseback into the range to scout potential routes. The idea was to create a trail that took significant time for people to explore. Less than a decade later, thanks in large part to work by the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Crest Trail was born. (At the time though, it was called the Skyline Trail.)

  Because of the geology of the Tetons, with canyons every 4 to 6 miles extending into the range like arthritic fingers, you don’t have to do the trail’s full 45 miles from Phillips Pass to String Lake. Pick your canyon—Granite, Open, Death—head west, and you will connect with the Crest Trail. The most popular route is to take the tram up to the 10,450-foot summit of Rendezvous Peak at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in the Bridger-Teton National Forest and hike west to Marion Lake in Grand Teton National Park and then come out to Jenny Lake, at the mouth of Cascade Canyon. This is usually done over 3 days.

  Bridger-Teton National Forest

  Grand Teton National Park is the wild land Jackson Hole is most famous for, but “the values that people like about the park wouldn’t exist without all of the other lands around here,” says Linda Merigliano. “You can’t just have national parks in isolation, especially not with the wildlife and conservation we have here.”

  The 3.4-million-acre BTNF (that’s almost eleven times bigger than GTNP and about 125 percent the size of Yellowstone) includes three wilderness areas, more than 2,000 miles of hiking trails, and thirty-seven developed campgrounds, and is home to at least 355 species of birds. It is a significant chunk of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the 34,375-square-mile zone including and around Yellowstone that is one of the largest nearly intact temperate-zone ecosystems on the planet. This means that today’s GYE has the same significant plant and animal species as it did before the arrival of European colonists.

  The BTNF is adjacent to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks and the National Elk Refuge. It fringes the town of Jackson to the east and south. Starting from the Town Square, walk 10 minutes in either of these directions and you’ll be in the BTNF. Linda says she agrees with a friend of hers who says, “People come for the Tetons, but stay for the national forest.” www.fs.usda.gov/btnf

  National Elk Refuge

  When it was founded in 1912, the National Elk Refuge wasn’t the country’s first wildlife refuge—that honor goes to Pelican Island, off the coast of Florida, which President Teddy Roosevelt established by executive order in 1903—but it was the first wildlife sanctuary specifically created for a terrestrial mammal and referred to as a “refuge.”

  About 6,000 to 7,000 elk migrate onto the refuge each winter. As impressive as this is, as recently as 130 years ago, tens of thousands of elk passed through Jackson Hole in autumn and then again in late spring. It is estimated that elk in North America once numbered 10 million, inhabiting most areas of the country. By the early 1900s, however, numbers had dropped to 50,000, plummeting just as bison numbers did. Elk were hunted for their hides, meat, and “ivory” teeth. Despite all this, the Jackson Hole elk herd was somewhat protected, at least until the town of Jackson came along.

  LOCAL LOWDOWN LINDA MERIGLIANO, Program Manager for Bridger-Teton National Forest

  Linda Merigliano was majoring in marine biology when she got a job as a seasonal ranger in the northern Tetons. She had been to the Tetons as a kid with her family and, when she saw this job posting, thought, “Yeah, I’d love to go back there.” Linda so loved working in the Tetons and in the backcountry that as soon as she returned to college—it was her senior year—she changed her major to natural resource management. “I spent the whole year taking natural resources–related courses I should have taken earlier,” she says. Merigliano made up all the coursework for her new major, and when she graduated, she got a seasonal position with the Forest Service in the Palisades area, near Swan Valley, Idaho.

&
nbsp; Linda continued working summer seasonal jobs and, in winter, taught skiing at Grand Targhee. When the Jedediah Smith Wilderness became a designated wilderness in 1984, Linda was there rangering. “Alaska Basin [arguably the heart of the Jed Smith and just west of the boundary of GTNP] is home to me,” Linda says. “I know that place really, really well and have been up there in all kinds of weather.”

  After earning a master’s degree in wilderness management, Linda traveled the country working as part of a Forest Service team that taught how to put together wilderness implementation schedules. She always returned home to the Tetons. And then, in 1991, the Bridger-Teton National Forest (BTNF) founded a permanent position that was a perfect fit for her as the recreation, wilderness, and trails program manager for the Jackson District of the BTNF. She’s been a permanent employee of the BTNF since then and, in 2016, was recognized with the Aldo Leopold Award for Overall Wilderness Stewardship by the US Forest Service.

  “I made a very conscious choice to stay here,” Linda says. “Jackson is such a unique community—we’re a resort, but have every kind of recreation going on here, and also have this conservation history and wildlife resources that don’t exist in any other resort community. The people who live here know and value that. My passion is recreation and wild places and the responsible use and care of those places. I want to be in a community where people care about those kinds of things.”