SUMMER IN THE ROCKIES JACKSON,
OUT OF THE HOLE
Story and photography
by Eric Anderson

Summer has come to the United States but the magnificent Tetons are still crusted in snow. They form the backcloth to one of America's great little places, Jackson, Wyoming, a rare bird: a small town plunked down in the middle of federal land. It hasn't changed much since I landed there in 1972 in my little Cessna; the airport still looks like something out of the movie Indiana Jones -- except the town now boasts some gorgeous art galleries with exquisite western art that is very, very expensive.

There's something very comforting - in this inconstant world we live in - to find things in town much the same: Barker-Ewing still runs float trips down the Snake river as it has for 43 years; Teton Wagon Train still thrills families under its family management of 30 years; Snow King Resort is still right there at the foot of Wyoming's first ski slope that opened in 1939 and Jackson's town square, which is really a grassy park that's been there since 1914, still has the massive arches of elk horn at each corner in a kitsch display unchanged from the 1950s.jacksonholechamber.com

Jackson can't grow out so it seems to grow in. Many alleys branch off from the streets to create little tourist delights. It's obvious tourism is big business. An 80-page glossy dining guide lists 66 restaurants in a town whose year-round population is less than 12,000. One restaurant on everyone's list for its décor rather than its food is the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar with its steakhouse downstairs. An eatery since 1936, its bar stools are polished saddles. Its decorations include surely the West's largest display of spurs, and a stuffed grizzly apparently killed "as verified by the Forestry Service" by an unarmed man it attacked. He allegedly bit its jugular and the bear bled to death. Ripley's Believe it or Not is just around the corner and how Ripley let that grizzly escape his collection takes some, er, believing.