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Is there an end in sight to the explosion of high-end links?
Teton Pines, opened in 1987 as Jackson Hole’s second golf course, has become a West Bank fixture that attracts second-home owners wanting a full range of amenities—including golf framed by the Tetons.
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Jack Huyler sits in a rocker on the porch fronting his log cabin on the Rocking H Ranch. A swath cut through the aspen glade to the north of his West Bank property frames the Grand Teton; songbirds flutter in the grove. To the east, one can see Sheep Mountain, a sedimentary expanse protruding from the eastern rim of the valley that looks like an Indian chief with arms crossed over chest in pharaonic repose.
This scene in summer 2007 could be the Jackson Hole of sixty years ago—were it not for the incessant roaring and beeping of bulldozers and graders in the background.
Huyler’s bright grin flashes as the eighty-eight-year-old recalls his family, in 1925, purchasing and then operating the Bear Paw dude ranch at the mouth of Granite Canyon in what is now Grand Teton National Park. The dudes that came from the East and West were wealthy people, Huyler recalls, but they respected and often idolized the cowboys who led them on trail rides and tended their horses. Huyler, who wrote That’s the Way It Was in Jackson’s Hole, staunchly defends the valley’s western roots and fondly recalls the dude ranch era when millionaires danced at Jackson saloons with waitresses.
“It once was a place where each man was as good as the next; where you were valued not by your money, but by the kind of person who you were,” Huyler says, his tone growing cross.
The beeping in the background serves as a reminder that the valley’s western heritage, and the once-minimal social stratification that Huyler so prized, continue to be shredded as the heavy machinery rips up another cattle pasture. Just a mile west of his cabin, steel blades shape mounds and hills, carve new ponds, and cut roads to make way for the Shooting Star golf course, luxury homes, and a Teton Village expansion.
When completed in summer 2009, Shooting Star will be the fifth golf course in Jackson Hole. Memberships at the clubs range from $30,000 to $150,000, and two of them—3 Creek and Snake River Sporting Club—limit play exclusively to members and their guests. The lots surroundings those courses cost millions of dollars. In neighboring Teton Valley, Idaho, six golf courses, some with accompanying residential and even commercial space, are either being built or open for play. Developers on both sides of the Tetons are executing the “amenity play”—attempting to attract the moneyed, who want to play golf where they live and/or see golf courses as adding value to the real estate.
Huyler, who protected his West Bank property with a conservation easement, is well aware of the irony presented by the Shooting Star development. His parents introduced the Stanley Resor family to Jackson Hole and sold them their first property in the 1920s. More than eighty years later, members of the Resor family—doing business as Snake River Associates—polarized the community as they applied for and won approval from the Teton County commissioners for the development, which features $100,000 memberships at the Tom Fazio-designed golf course, as well as five hundred new homes.
Although Huyler would prefer that Jackson Hole visitors wear denim and cowboy hats and ride horses, hike mountains, fish, and watch wildlife, he has nothing against the game of golf. What he hates are the trappings that come with high-priced courses, the shameless flaunting of wealth that he thinks should have no place in Jackson, and the social divide created by exclusive developments available only to those who can pay enough to play.
“They encourage Shetland sweaters and jewelry and Mercedes—the old game of ‘I’ve got bigger jewels than you’,” says Huyler, who recently traded in his large SUV for a gas-sipping Toyota Prius. “What I object to is the social stratification.”
In late fall 2007, John Resor stands atop the man-made hill backing the first green at Shooting Star, located next to Teton Village. The 250-acre property, once a flat cow pasture, has been shaped to look like the glacial moraines found north of the property in Grand Teton National Park. The mix of conifers and aspens planted along the edge of holes matches the valley’s native plants. Fairways curve, rise, and fall through the faux-glacial terrain. Expanses of sagebrush separating the fairways will foster desert shooting star, a perennial wildflower native to the West Bank rangeland.
Resor, dressed in denim, work boots, and a parka, is president of the development company building the course, and the third generation of his family to own property in the valley. Shooting Star, which is advertised under the slogan “Old West Meets the New West” and uses a western spur as its logo, is supposed to sustain the Resor-family-owned Snake River Ranch surrounding Huyler’s land. That means one of the icons of the West, grazing steers, will populate pastures along Highway 390, the road that leads to Teton Village and, north of there, to an entrance to the national park.
Golf operations will pay Snake River Associates $300,000 annually to support the ranch, which, Resor says in an interview at his Teton Pines office, has struggled to turn a profit. Why did the family, which has members who wish the property were in the less-developed Pinedale area, opt to subdivide pasture, expand Teton Village, and create a tony golf course? Why are they creating the kind of enclave that, as Huyler argues, can lead only to further stratification in the valley?
