Email
PrintX Marks the Spot
Come winter, this historic dude ranch quiets down and turns intimate.
Cross-country skiers can kick and glide to their hearts’ content on the snowmobile-packed ski trail at the Triangle X Ranch. The scenery’s not so bad, either.
Situated east off Highway 26/89/191 about midway between the town of Jackson and Yellowstone National Park’s South Entrance, the Triangle X Ranch is a throwback to earlier days and simpler ways. Decidedly not your chocolate-on-the-pillow, 600-thread-count-Egyptian-cotton-bedsheets kind of place, this working guest ranch offers a more rustic brand of luxury, making it an ideal place for a laid-back winter weekend getaway.
As soon as Nancy and I pulled into the ranch parking area, I sensed we had arrived at a classic gem of a place. And that the Triangle X is, brimming even in winter with the western sights, sounds, and smells of lively horses and leather saddles, wood smoke and grilling beef.
The weather gods hadn’t seemed to notice or care that it was mid-March and the final weekend of the Triangle X’s winter season. The drive getting there had been icy and dicey, and when we pulled up to our destination we were met with heavy snow and blustery cold. TJ, the summer wrangler and (as far as I could tell) winter almost everything, met us with a snowmachine pulling a sled and offered to haul our gear to our three-bedroom cabin.
After getting somewhat settled into our simple but clean and comfy quarters, we mosied a couple of hundred feet over to the main lodge and sat down to a hot lunch with hangers-on from a party the night before, members of a local service group. We looked out on the snow-covered front yard, around which individual cabins stood in a U-shaped arrangement, with the opening of the U pointing west toward the Tetons. Old wagons and other equipment served as drifted-in lawn ornaments. At the center of it all flapped a ragged and faded American flag on a pole, along with a smaller and equally tattered Wyoming state flag. The Stars and Stripes and the broadside bison were obviously regular recipients of such battering breezes.
Next, we headed out for a brisk five-mile cross-country ski. To begin, we followed the snowmobile-packed trail leading south along the post-and-rail fence marking the front of the ranch property. This stretch provided stunning views of the parade of Teton peaks marching southward. Soon, the trail cut to the east, ascended a lightly timbered drainage notch where the wind was noticeably absent, and then joined for a ways with the Continental Divide Snowmobile Trail heading north. After veering back west, we rocketed down a slick ramp, passing a pair of moose reposing in the woods before reaching the ranch’s impressive vehicle graveyard. Cars and trucks and vans—decades’ worth, I’m guessing—lay buried deep in wind-blown snowdrifts.
“How many of these do you think run, even in the summer?” Nancy asked.
Nearing the lodge we met and petted a puppy named Chance while visiting with his owner, the two of them out for a canine–human constitutional. Afterward, we donned swim suits and slipped into the large outdoor Jacuzzi on the deck that protrudes northward from the main lodge. It felt so good that we stayed in for over an hour. The chilling breeze on bare shoulders and wind-whipped snowflakes tickling our noses made it all the easier to remain submerged, and the harder to get out.
Nancy and I had the place almost to ourselves for the weekend; the only other guests were a pair of professional dancers: a man from San Francisco and a woman from New York City who’d become fast friends years before while attending the same dance school. Of all the joints in all the towns separating the Big Apple and the Golden Gate, they’d discovered and settled on the Triangle X as the place to meet and get reacquainted—though neither of them had even visited Jackson Hole before.
Consequently, we four guests were the lucky recipients of the full dinnertime attention of the current ranch patriarch, Harold Turner, who regaled us with tales from the ranch’s storied past. (Dinner, by the way, was a classic cowboy T-bone steak and salad, followed up with a small-plate-NOT ice-cream sundae. The gal waiting our table knew precisely how Harold wanted his, so I’m guessing it was not his first such dessert.)
The Triangle X is within and part of Grand Teton National Park; that is, it’s not a private inholding, but a privately run, park-owned concession. This was not always the case.
The land here, Harold explained, was purchased by his grandfather, John S. “Dad” Turner, in 1926 from its original homesteader, a man named Bill Jump. Dad Turner was the son of a Mormon handcart pioneer who’d settled in Morgan, Utah. Not long after Dad bought the place, John D. Rockefeller Jr. began his quest to purchase large tracts of land in Jackson Hole, surreptitiously under the guise of the Snake River Land Company and with the ultimate goal of handing them over to the government to create an enlarged Grand Teton park. Rockefeller bought out not only Turner’s Triangle X, which he acquired in 1929, but other storied dude ranches as well, including the Elbo, the JY, and the Bar BC. Cumulatively, his efforts greatly reduced the degree of dude-ranching activity in Jackson Hole, an industry that had been up and running for about twenty years at the time.
Unlike some of the other early dude ranchers, like the Bar BC’s well-known Struthers Burt, Dad Turner opted to keep running his Triangle X. He did it by way of a lease arrangement of the lands that had been his but no longer were, along with those of several other nearby former homesteads. Dad continued operating the dude ranch in this manner through 1936, when he and his wife left to open the new Turpin Meadow Lodge in Buffalo Valley.
Dad Turner’s eldest son, John C. Turner, subsequently hammered out a new lease on the Triangle X from the Snake River Land Company. It worked well—until fourteen years later, when the ranchlands were absorbed into the newly expanded Grand Teton National Park. Leasing lands was no longer an option, so in 1953 Turner and his sister Louise became concessioners, which permitted them to continue running the Triangle X as a dude ranch.
Today, the Triangle X is run under a partnership involving the ranch’s three third-generation Turner brothers: Harold, the oldest; John, the middle brother (and from 1989 to 1993 the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service); and Donald, the youngest. The place boasts two important distinctions: It is the only concessioner-operated dude ranch in the entire National Park System, and it’s the longest-running dude ranch in Jackson Hole.
Lots of history to absorb, and a terrific place to spend a winter weekend. So terrific, that Nancy and I squeezed every available moment out of it by delaying our Sunday morning departure as long as possible. But workers were shuttering up for the season, with the lion’s share of employees heading south or west; somewhere, anywhere, warm and not white. Most would be back two months later, though, rested and ready for a summer of dudes at the historic Triangle X Ranch.
In winter the Triangle X Ranch can accommodate up to thirty guests, who overnight in their choice of a one-, two-, or three-bedroom log cabin with full bath. The food is hearty and good, dished up in a dining room lighted with deer-horn chandeliers and boasting spectacular Teton Range vistas. The winter season runs from the day after Christmas through mid-March, when activities include cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, snowmobiling, photography, and wildlife viewing. Winter rates for the 2009–10 season are $125 per person nightly, with a minimum two-night stay required. For more information, call (307) 733–2183 or visit www.TriangleX.com.
