At the end of the ski day, on the very western edge of Wyoming, skiers and snowboarders funnel down to Grand Targhee Resort’s bustling, simple base area, where there is approximately one après spot — the Trap Bar — for those seeking celebratory libations and bites. For Targhee afficionados, a mostly eastern Idaho regional crowd, it’s a delight: a down-to-earth, central gathering spot for the community after a day of good snow and scant lift lines. The small eatery is often packed to the gills, with the next options 25 minutes away by car, in Driggs, Idaho.
The Trap Bar is joined by a few dated lodges, built in 1969 on then-publicly owned U.S. Forest Service land, a small general store, ski shop and large, free parking area for day skiers. Ski Magazine sums up Targhee by saying the resort “boasts a warm, friendly spirit that’s everything you love about skiing without any of the overpriced fluff.”
However beloved the ski area’s character is, Grand Targhee Resort owner Geordie Gillett says it must expand dramatically into public lands and build a bigger, high-end base area featuring private real estate. Growth is essential to maintain the balance and vibe, the resort says on its website. To that end, Gillett has requested the federal government expand the resort’s permit boundary area into 850 acres of Caribou-Targhee National Forest, and is readying to ask the Teton County, Wyoming board of county commissioners to approve base-area plans for a first phase of constructing new commercial, lodging and luxury homes on 120 acres of private land at the ski area base, acquired as the result of a Forest Service land swap.
The location of Grand Targhee brings jurisdictional complexity and confusion: there are two Teton Counties: one on the Idaho side, one on the Wyoming side. They do not necessarily have the same priorities. The development decisions for private land are made in Teton County, Wyoming, and tax revenues from Targhee flow to Wyoming. The burdens such as increased housing needs, traffic and tourism pressure, environmental and water impacts, loss of critical wildlife habitat and corridors, impacts of low-wage job creation, and public transit and road maintenance fall to Teton County, Idaho.
Targhee’s public lands request for boundary expansions met a resounding no from the public and local governments in Idaho and Wyoming, based on comments submitted to the Caribou-Targhee in June of 2025 on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement, a 600-page document released by the Forest earlier this year. Critics cited a demonstrable lack of need and destruction of critical wildlife habitat in Greater Yellowstone, along with other environmental and community costs. Public sentiment, based on comments submitted to the Caribou-Targhee, was 10 to 1 in opposition to expansion, according to Teton County, Idaho commissioner Dan Powers.
Powers and Brad Wolfe, another Teton County, Idaho commissioner, wrote a letter in opposition of public land expansion for Targhee. The remaining commissioner, Ron James, wrote a personal letter in support, which also acknowledged that the county does not have the funding in place to handle the increased burdens of housing, traffic and emergency services, largely due to Idaho’s state-level restriction on local regulations. Wyoming’s Teton County also wrote a letter to the Forest Service in detailed opposition of expanding the ski area’s permitted boundary.
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The time to protest private land base area development is long past: Targhee was granted a Resort Master Plan in 2008, updated in 2019. When Teton County, Wyoming, approved the 2008 Resort Master Plan, it granted substantially less development than Gillett asked for. Future development was capped at 450 lodging units total and 150,000 square feet of commercial. Gillett next proposed moves toward that cap including two new buildings, new hotel rooms, a new and larger Trap Bar, and expanded commercial space.
Relatively, Targhee is not adding a huge amount of development, compared to Wyoming’s Jackson Hole Mountain Resort or Montana’s Big Sky Resort, for example. But what the application lays bare are the impacts of ongoing overdevelopment within the sensitive Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, development in inappropriate places, and the difficulties of gaining control of worsening socioeconomic issues, said Luther Propst, a member of the Teton County, Wyoming, board of county commissioners.
“Planning involves regulation. And if we don’t plan within the context of the ecosystem we’re in, we are contributing to its demise.”
Cindy Reigel, founder, Project Greater Yellowstone
Teton County, Idaho is already in a mighty struggle to handle growth and fund essential services. As James alluded to in his letter to the Forest Service, Teton Valley’s lack of funding is due largely to Idaho state laws prohibiting counties from regulating short-term rentals in any way and limiting the growth of property tax collection countywide to no more than 3 percent per year, regardless of building and growth occurs in a given year. It’s still only part of a firestorm causing problems for Teton Valley.
“We need to plan our communities better,” said Cindy Reigel, founder of the Project Greater Yellowstone nonprofit and who served as a TCI commissioner from 2014-2025. “Planning involves regulation. And if we don’t plan within the context of the ecosystem we’re in, we are contributing to its demise. And it’s not doing well on either side of the pass.”
In Teton County, Wyoming, development has exploded over the last few decades. It’s now the wealthiest county in the country by far, so much so that if averaged out among all residents, each person would have a per-capita income of nearly half a million dollars. That’s double that of Summit County, Utah, the second wealthiest. But it also has the biggest wealth gap in the nation, with the middle class fleeing an untenable cost of living to nearby places like Teton County, Idaho, leaving behind the lowest earners and the ultra-wealthy.
“The development of Targhee doesn’t seem to be the driving issue for Teton County, Idaho. The big issue seems to be the impact of what’s happening in Jackson,” said Natalie Ooi, who studies the outdoor recreation economy and is a professor at the University of Colorado’s environmental studies graduate program. “These communities haven’t gotten ahead of the problem for years, and it compounds. We know what happens when you don’t plan: trophy homes, short-term rentals, rising costs. But these conversations don’t typically happen until things have gotten really bad.”
In Wyoming, current residents are clamoring for affordable housing as new, low-wage hospitality and service positions are created en masse, and . Wildlife habitat and movement is threatened by traffic, new subdivisions and luxury home development. The Wyoming Department of Transportation is threatening to build more and wider roads to host the influx of low-wage service workers streaming in daily (also through wildlife habitat) from across the region. Wealthy landowners are fighting conservation easements, fighting to control access to public lands, and the generous philanthropy and long-term vision that helped create the epic land and wildlife protections around Jackson — best exemplified by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s purchase and donation of 33,000 acres of land to Grand Teton National Park — is hardly to be seen. Development approvals in both the Town of Jackson and the county simply become larger and more frequent, and developers bolder and pushier.
That’s all despite the fact that the Jackson-Teton County Comprehensive plan, meant to guide development, states its three guiding pillars as ecosystem stewardship, growth management and quality of life. “The vision statement of the comp plan is beautiful,” says Jenny Fitzgerald, executive director of the nonprofit Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance. “But it hasn’t really impacted our land-development regulations.”
For former lawmaker Reigel, it seems clear that Teton County Wyoming’s lack of foresight in community planning and failure to prioritize ecosystem protections have created a mess for the region. But, as Ooi points out, is it Geordie Gillett’s fault that Idaho doesn’t have the regulations it needs to protect and fund its own communities? “There is competition in the resort space, and it’s in Targhee’s best interest to develop,” she said. “And it does bring economic benefit.”
An important question that stems from new tourism based developments, however, is this: Who benefits, and for the community as a whole, will the benefits equal, much less surpass, the burdens created? And is there a breaking point for these communities?
“We already have a lot of housing pressure, and there are so few regulations here, developers are just throwing up these huge apartment buildings,” said Alexa Wood, a 22-year old fifth generation Victor, Idaho resident and Targhee skier. “The overflow from Jackson has just taken over in the last five years. No one is looking at the big picture here.” Many parts of that big picture: housing, cost of living, wildlife, community character and transit, are arguably external factors over which Targhee itself has no control, but that its expansion will impact.
Those concerns include a greater proliferation of homes in the short-term rental market, and the generation of hundreds of new low-wage jobs that will provide insufficient income to afford living in TCI. According to a 2022 Socioeconomic Technical Report cofounded by both TCI and TCWY, in 2020 Grand Targhee Resort had 568 full-time employees and about $20 million payroll, which averaged out around $36,000 a year per employee. That is well below what’s needed to afford housing in TCI, where the median home cost is currently about $830,000 and indicates a future impact that will likely be borne by the communities in Idaho.
Change may be coming for the region, but slowly. According to current TCWY commissioner Mark Newcomb, today’s board of commissioners would have likely passed a different, less development-friendly plan than happened in 2008. “At that time, there was a sense that the amount of development was scaled back quite a bit,” Newcomb told the Jackson Hole News and Guide earlier this year. “In hindsight it does seem like it’s a lot of development for that area.”
Fellow commissioner Propst agrees. “It’s a different world now than when this plan was approved,” he said. “Legally, now we can’t say no, we can’t undo the masterplan, we can’t send the tax revenue to another county in another state, we can’t require Targhee to pay Teton County, Idaho, impact fees. And that’s not even considering the impacts to wildlife and water quality due to this development.”
“In a perfect world, there would have been proactive planning, and the Greater Yellowstone communities would have had a plan to protect themselves and the ecosystem,” said the University of Colorado’s Ooi. “But in fairness, it’s tough to see what will happen 30 years down the road.”
Arguably, though, it’s not a different world at all. For Franz Carmenzind, a Jackson Hole-based scientist, conservation activist and filmmaker who fought the original land swap that effectively granted Targhee a private inholding in the national forest, the problems of today are no surprise. “I’ve been around long enough to know a resort will always find excuses to expand, and expand, and expand,” he said. “Admitting mistakes made in approvals later on doesn’t change anything. It’s the environment that pays and suffers, and disturbances reverberate through these wildlands. I’m not going to cry over the people that have to live with impacts. I will cry over poor decisions that impact the environment.”
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Grand Targhee Resort itself was founded with donations as a local community amenity in the late 1960s to improve quality of life in eastern Idaho and to keep residents from moving away. Today, community members are facing the classic irony of the American tourist town: a lack of long-term foresight and planning which should have begun decades ago. It’s left the descendants of those original residents in an economic monoculture, unable to contend with rising costs of living, and now being pushed out involuntarily.
“This idea that growth is inevitable is a myth, one developers and certain landowners love to repeat. It’s an anti-planning rhetoric that ignores the tools we have available,” said Reigel. “We also have to shift the mindsets and regulations of planning departments to prioritize the concerns of the ecosystem and the communities they are supposed to be representing, instead of the developers.”
Since 2008, the explosion of development, tourism, cost of living, and an ever-larger human footprint negatively impacting wildlife of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has intensified dramatically. These days, says Propst, Teton County, Idaho, is the victim of a perfect storm.
“They have a 3 percent cap on taxes annually, they can’t regulate short-term rentals in any way, Teton County, Wyoming can’t legally impose fees that will help Teton County, Idaho, or send our tax revenue over, and certainly the USFS should deny Targhee’s request for boundary expansion for many reasons, but it’ll create even more low wage jobs,” he said. And that is rapidly changing the face of Teton Valley.
“I don’t know if I’ll stay,” said Wood, the fifth-generation resident. “Most of the people and families I grew up with have left, they have been pushed out.”
When Targhee was first conceived and funded by the local community, it was all on public land. In 1997, the Gillett family acquired the ski resort’s lease and infrastructure, and saw an opportunity to turn parts of the base into private land: the Forest Service had marked a parcel in Idaho on the southern border of Yellowstone National Park, called Squirrel Meadows, as critical wildlife habitat. It was a desirable acquisition for the Forest Service to protect the habitat. Squirrel Meadows happened to be owned by the Gillett family, and they pursued a swap of the meadows for land at Targhee’s base.
Public sentiment, based on comments submitted to the Caribou-Targhee, was 10 to 1 in opposition to the expansion of Grand Targhee Resort.
Early versions of the swap proposed 330 acres of Gillett family land for 265 acres of land at Targhee, but vocal opposition killed those iterations. In a 1997 Deseret News article, Carmenzind, then-director of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, told the paper that the nonprofit wasn’t buying what the Gilletts were selling. “We were opposed to the trade then and we are opposed to it now,” Carmenzind said at the time. “Nothing has changed. This push to privatize land and create a private commercial center so close to the Jedediah Wilderness area is simply inappropriate.”
Conservationists at the time advocated that the Forest Service find another way to acquire the land, but Gillett did not give up on his quest. In 2004, a deal was reached: Gillett got 120 acres at the base of Targhee in exchange for giving 400 acres of Squirrel Meadows to the agency for wildlife habitat. In 2008, Targhee was granted its resort masterplan to develop the now private acreage at the base.
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At the ski area, the down-to-earth vibe remains for now: there are no high-rise luxury hotel chains or vacant slopeside mansions. Targhee’s current 2,600 skiable acres hosts just over 200,000 skier visits annually, compared to its neighbor, Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, with 2,500 acres and often well over 500,000 skier visits. For those reasons and more, Targhee’s fans wax poetic about lack of pretense and the joyful, egalitarian vibe, long gone from most large ski areas, and the idea that new development will not improve Targhee.
For Victor resident and Targhee skier Casey Williams, the low-key community vibe that still exists at Targhee is unique in today’s ski world. It’s also a source of pride. “We get loads of parents and volunteers at ski races, and they all say Targhee is fantastic [and] they can’t wait to come back,” said Williams, who is assistant race coach for the Grand Targhee Ski and Snowboard Foundation. “Everyone who comes from a fancy resort loves Targhee because it’s not fancy. There is a lot of appreciation for what Targhee is – I think it’s perfect as it is.”
Nonetheless, change is coming to the base area, possibly to public lands, and will impact the local community, and it will impact the mule deer, elk, bears, bighorn sheep, and other wild animals even more. Skiing aside, housing crises and municipal service aside, Targhee, like nearly every other development project around the entire Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, is centered on a “right to build” mentality, a right to make as much money as possible off land that is held in private hands — and sometimes, such as in the case of privately owned ski areas, off public lands.
“Everybody thinks there is a proper level of what the government can tell you you can do with your land,” Powers said. “That level varies widely from person to person. But I don’t hear people saying we need more growth.”
It is true that in some other countries and cultures, people advocate for, or are willing to accept, rules that work for the larger community: Norway has zones around resort areas where homes can only be purchased for use as a full-time, primary residence, and hotels and short-term rentals for vacationers are confined to areas at the base of the resort itself. Switzerland has strict rules on who can purchase homes, and tightly regulated short-term rentals. But whether such community regulation could ever be broadly implemented in the United States is dubious at best, at least at the moment. “There’s always a sentiment in the U.S. based on individual rights over the community whole,” Ooi said.
Still, the argument that people can’t be told what to do with their land in Wyoming or Idaho is weak. Zoning already accomplishes this, and zoning can change. Skyscrapers with 47 stories can’t be built in Driggs. You can’t keep chickens or farm animals in the town of Jackson. A landowner would find it hard to get a private jail approved, or use their land to store nuclear waste, or rent one four-bedroom house (legally) to four separate families at once.
Yet, when developers, often from out of state, buy land within Greater Yellowstone and propose unpopular projects that will burden the local community, sometimes applying for zoning waivers, it’s accepted. The larger, unhappy community feels no recourse, and so large, detrimental projects come to fruition over and over again. Elected officials say they must approve things, because the rules say the developer can build.
For those in the surrounding communities watching the functionality and beauty of the ecosystem lose project by project, it is uniquely frustrating. “Jackson has got to be the case study of doing the opposite of what you say you are going to do when it comes to putting the ecosystem first,” said Casey Williams, who grew up in Jackson. “There’s a science school right in the middle of mule deer movement corridors, and 10,000 square-foot trophy homes all over the mule deer and elk winter range. It’s like a Ponzi scheme: marketing natural treasures and then building all over it.”
The current ecosystem, with plants, animals, migration corridors and other wonders, draws people from around the globe precisely because these things have been destroyed where they live. “We can find something more ideal than what is going on,” said Jenny Fitzgerald, executive director of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance. “We need to start regaining control of development whenever and wherever we can. It’s not too late. There is still intact habitat, but this area has a carrying capacity and there will have to be limits if we are to have coexistence with the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and for it to survive.”
For Reigel, 10 years in local government has been educational, but frustrating as well. The fact that corporate interests can bend community growth in directions at odds with stated community interests is something she says needs to change. And the path forward is regulatory. “We need to elect people who understand the importance of standing up to developers,” Reigel said, “and educating government employees like planners on the importance of community values.”
Ultimately, in Greater Yellowstone, it no longer matters whose fault the current problems are. Development is surely to blame, but developers only do what they are allowed to do, more or less. According to advocates like Reigel, the most powerful tool to effect real change and solve overdevelopment is qualified and concerned citizens running for office, and voters electing those who prioritize impactful planning and conservation legislation. Responsibility lies with communities, who they elect, and what they quietly acquiesce to.
Changes are overdue, but counties like Teton, Wyoming and Teton, Idaho, can make the situation better if they have the appetite.If voters are able to prioritize the big picture, she says, saving the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem may just help to solve the issues the human communities are facing too.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Read Mountain Journal‘s earlier coverage of Grand Targhee Resort’s expansion plans here.
