Under a chrome-colored sky ribboned by rainclouds, local outfitter Jake Hutton led a horseback tour of the Kelly Parcel, telling stories all the while.
“I got charged by a grizzly bear right here last spring,” said Hutton, who runs JH Outfitters in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. “She came barreling out of the trees and bluff charged for a second, stopped at 50 yards, stood up and growled, and then made up her mind and took off right after me again.”
Luckily, he outran the bear on his horse. His story illustrates how this land not far from the resort town of Jackson Hole is still untamed. It’s bordered on three sides by the Grand Teton National Park. Birds and butterflies cruise over the sloping hills of sagebrush and aspen groves at the feet of the jagged Grand Teton Mountains.
In March, after an outcry over a proposal to auction it off, Wyoming legislators detailed a plan to sell the state-owned, 640-acre parcel to Grand Teton National Park for $100 million. Now the land has become something of a bargaining chip for state leaders who are asking for a few other things, too.
Unless they’re satisfied, an important migration corridor for moose, elk and pronghorn antelope could end up in the hands of private developers, who would find it attractive for its picturesque views of the park.
But there’s pressure to sell to someone.
Wyoming, like many Western states, is constitutionally obligated to raise money from public lands. In Wyoming, that money is used mostly for public schools. The revenue can come through leasing land for grazing, for recreation or by selling it off. Currently the state raises only around $2,800 annually off the land.
Last year Wyoming state land commissioners considered selling the Kelly Parcel off in a public auction.
That proposal prompted opposition from thousands of Wyomingites who sent letters and crowded into public hearings across the state.
“To have folks outside of Teton County in Cody and Casper show up at these public meetings and really say, ‘Make sure it gets to the Park Service,’” said Leslie Mattson, the president of Grand Teton National Park Foundation, a fundraising arm of the park. “My point of view? That was incredibly meaningful for us to know that folks across the state value this piece, and that was a real motivator for us.
After the uproar, the Wyoming Legislature passed a bill allowing two years for the federal government to buy the land for not-less-than $100 million and merge it with the park adjacent to it. Mattson’s foundation will have to come up with nearly $38 million. The federal government will kick in the rest.
“This is a heavy lift for us to raise $38 million basically from early winter until hopefully sometime during calendar year 24,” she said.
She said it’s the largest figure the foundation has ever had to raise, and while Mattson and the foundation are cautiously optimistic they’ll find the funds in time, the nail-biting isn’t nearly over. “People say, ‘Well, congratulations. You got it done,’” she said. “I’m like, ‘No, we didn’t get it done yet.’”
That’s because there are several other obstacles to the sale. For one, there’s a deep-seated distrust of the federal government in the Cowboy State.
“It’s a fairly common problem throughout the West, wherever there’s federal land,” said Gregg Cawley, a professor who studies environmental politics at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. “Just talking about how the federal government is interfering with our lives in the abstract doesn’t get anywhere. But when it comes to something like land policy, there’s a certain kind of tangibility to it.”
According to Cawley, a state’s political atmosphere often comes into play – especially in a solidly-red state like Wyoming – in cases like the Kelly Parcel where state lands run up against federal lands.
And there are things the state wants besides money. In the bill passed by the Legislature, there’s a line tying the fate of the deal for the Kelly Parcel to something else lawmakers want: More access to an area in the southwest corner of the state, owned by the federal government.
The federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM), under the Biden administration, wants to conserve that area, which is located near the city of Rock Springs. But Wyoming leaders want that land open for natural resource extraction and grazing.
Eventually, any deal would have to go before the state Board of Land Commissioners for final approval. And some of its members, like Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder, still want more in return.
“We cannot allow the federal government to get a sweetheart deal on the backs of Wyoming students, which these state lands fund,” said Degenfelder, who’s one of five members on the board.
She wants the state to get access to oil and gas resources on federal lands in yet another part of Wyoming, even though that request could jeopardize the Kelly Parcel deal.
“That’s too bad,” she said in an interview. “I mean, we have to do what’s best for Wyoming, I will always, always do what’s best for Wyoming rather than the federal government.”
Of course, if any of these complications block the sale to the national park, the parcel could wind up right back where this all began, with the board putting it up for auction and private development.
But according to Jared Baecker, the Wyoming conservation coordinator at the nonprofit Greater Yellowstone Coalition, developing it would “absolutely fragment and hinder some of the greatest migrations of hoofed mammals in the lower 48 states.”
He and others point to the unique geography of the parcel and the mountains surrounding it.
“Physically, the landscape is a bottleneck; it’s a choke point between two mountain ranges,” Baecker said. “It also serves as a migration path.”
In the sagebrush and hills of the Kelly Parcel, the political battle over the sale seems far away as the sun sets behind mountains that jut up like the teeth of some ancient beast.
“I’m pretty convinced this is the best view in Wyoming right here,” guide Hutton said.
He could go out of business if this land is sold to the national park, which might not let his private tours continue. He’d prefer things stay as they are, but again, Wyoming needs to make money off this land and pay for schools.
Hutton said he would be outraged if that means selling it to developers.
“You look around, like, what is wild sage worth?” he said. “All these wild animals having somewhere to roam around? What’s it worth to go to walk your dog in an open space?”
Grand Teton National Park Foundation has a little less than two years to raise the money.
