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An early 1930s effort to turn Jackson Hole into a winter-sports destination went downhill...fast.
The spent casing from the .45-caliber bullet John Emery put into Vernie Hubbard, which fell into the hands of this article's author.
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In the 1980s, as the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort grew beyond its teenage years and its owners sought to make it a world-class destination, they struggled against a tangled roadblock of obstacles that seemed to conspire to thwart their efforts. Jackson Hole appeared to have what it needed to attain a coveted status in league with European alpine royalty like Chamonix, Zermatt, and Kitzbuhel. Rendezvous Mountain jutted 4,139 vertical feet in a cliff-studded gesture etched with steep couloirs. Founders Paul McCollister, Alex Morley, and Gordon Graham built an aerial tram whose presence proclaimed “this is alpine terrain.” The 13,770-foot Grand Teton, perhaps the most Matterhorn-like of American peaks, served as a backdrop to the ski area’s summit hut. Nearby, a quaint western cowboy town, a world-class elk herd, and two neighboring national parks added cachet that not even Madison Avenue could have invented. Indeed, Jackson Hole easily deserved to be a two-season resort, not just the summer gateway to a pair of famous national parks.
Yet McCollister and his partners waged an uphill battle in starting their downhill resort. No nearby major city fueled a local clientele. Jackson Hole was remote; getting to the valley required expensive, circuitous flights landing at a mountainous airport, or white-knuckled driving through treacherous canyons and over precipitous mountain passes. Once here, visitors battled a combination of nature and geography. The Teton Fault that created the mountain left virtually no beginners’ terrain, and blizzards raked the 10,450-foot summit with cold, wind, and snow that demanded covering up the chic wardrobe of any skier wanting to take more than one run.
Had McCollister read his history, he might have foreseen the challenges he would face when launching the Jackson Hole Ski Corp. in 1963. Efforts to put Jackson Hole on the winter sports map had begun as early as 1932, and were fraught with adversity from the get-go. Then, as McCollister would experience later, circumstance and environment would seem to ally themselves in opposition to progress, all spun around a cast of characters seemingly sprung from a screenwriter’s closet. A surly bartender, ebullient community boosters, avaricious and corpulent salesmen, and a lawyer who dodged a murder rap: they all acted in a story involving gunplay, death by avalanche, and attempted murder.
