Headwaters

Fall fall

2016 issue issue No. No. 11

Evolving Ethics

Warmer Future

Picture Perfect

The forces that shaped our parks

Climate change and Yellowstone

Four photographers give their views

Imagine a Development in Grand Teton National Park.

View looking west across the parcel

Photo: Bob Woodall/FPI Inc

We Can’t. Can You?

A $23 million fundraising effort is underway. If we don’t succeed, Wyoming’s school trust parcel on Antelope Flats could be sold for development. How can you help? If each person who cares about the park gives a gift before December 31, 2016, we can protect this highly visible, critically important land and save a vulnerable part of Grand Teton that could otherwise be lost forever.

• 640 acres prominently placed in Grand Teton • $46 million purchase price; $23 million privately funded, $23 million federally funded • Revenue benefits Wyoming public schools • The Department of the Interior’s highest priority inholding in the nation • A keystone acquisition that completes the heart of the park and preserves critical wildlife habitat and unobstructed scenery

Love Your Park? Support Your Park.

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Contact GTNPF President Leslie Mattson at 307-732-0629, email leslie@gtnpf.org, or visit www.gtnpf.org/donate.

Headwaters | 2016 Edition

Contents

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4

Our Changing Park

by Robert W. Righter

6

Evolving Ethics Shaped Parks

by Mike Koshmrl

11

Yellowstone’s Competitive Advantage

by Todd Wilkinson

15

Peering into the Future

by Cory Hatch

22

The Synergy of Beauty

by Kelsey Dayton

25

Shooting for Conservation

by David Stubbs, Mark

Gocke, Thomas Mangelsen

and Mike Cavaroc

29

Subdivisions in the Crosshairs

by Mike Koshmrl

33

What do Grizzlies Need?

by Caroline Byrd

a Note from the editor

By Cory Hatch

W

elcome to the first edition of the Jackson Hole News&Guide’s conservation section “Headwaters.” Here we hope to highlight and celebrate Jackson Hole’s outsized role in the birth of an idea: the intrinsic value of wildness for its own sake.

One hundred years ago, the American people gave substance to that idea with the creation of the National Park Service. And by the end of this year, roughly 5 million people will have witnessed the fruits of that labor in our own Hatch back yard as they visit Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks.

Those 5 million people will take with them the imprint of their experiences — whether it’s a chance encounter with moose

Special supplement written, produced and printed by the Jackson Hole News&Guide Publisher: Kevin Olson Associate Publisher: Adam Meyer Editor: John R. Moses Deputy Editors: Richard Anderson, Johanna Love Headwaters Special Section Editor: Cory Hatch Layout and Design: Nick Stonecipher Photographers: Bradly J. Boner, Ryan Dorgan, Rugile Kaladyte

on Jackson Lake, watching Old Faithful blow or a climb up to the summit of the Grand Teton — and the seeds of the conservation idea will spread.

As the Park Service celebrates its centennial, we thought it appropriate to look back at the advocates, artists and organizations that worked to preserve Jackson Hole, Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park. “Crucible of Conservation” author Robert Righter ruminates on Grand Teton National Park’s contentious past and overcrowded future, and Todd Wilkinson profiles Ray Rasker, an economist who has developed groundbreaking ideas about the dollar value of nature.

We tapped some of the region’s best photographers to get a glimpse of what conservation means today. We also surveyed researchers about the possible future of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem after 50 to 100 years of climate change.

Jackson Hole truly is the headwaters of the modern conservation movement. In these pages, we pay homage to that legacy. Enjoy.

Contributors: Caroline Byrd, Mike Cavaroc, Kelsey Dayton, Mark Gocke, Cory Hatch, Mike Koshmrl, Thomas Mangelsen, Robert Righter, David Stubbs, Todd Wilkinson Advertising Sales: Andra Adamson Foster, Karen Brennan, Matt Cardis, Tom Hall, Chad Repinski Advertising Coordinator: Oliver O’Connor Creative Services Manager: Lydia Redzich Advertising Design: Natalie Connell, Sarah Grengg

Office Manager: Kathleen Godines Customer Service Managers: Lucia Perez, Rudy Perez Circulation: Kyra Griffin, Hank Smith, Jeff Young ©2016 Teton Media Works Jackson Hole News&Guide P.O. Box 7445, 1225 Maple Way Jackson, WY 83002 , 307-733-2047 Fax: 307-733-2138, www.jhnewsandguide.com 2016 Edition | Headwaters

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COURTESY PHOTO

Our changing park Teton area residents have an obligation to protect and preserve the region.

By Robert W. Righter

C

onflict rests at the heart of the Teton story.

Across the peaks and this sagebrush valley, preservationists and their varied opponents have fought many fights. Today it is difficult to imagine this land as anything but a national park, but its conservation story is one of deep divides and conflicting views.

Whether they were rugged individualists, cattlemen, Easterners or dude ranchers, they were certain they had the answer. Government agencies, too — such as the U.S. Forest Service, the state of Wyoming, Teton County, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service — all disagreed about how this country should be managed.

During the hectic, bitter days of the 1930s, the vitriol spread over the valley like a plague. Before going to a party or meeting, biologist Olaus Murie would ascertain who was for the national park and who was not. Being a peaceable man, he would then act accordingly. It was not an easy time as agencies and people fought and sued each other, all wanting hegemony over the valley. Jackson Hole even had a vindictive, spunky, devil-may-care, master-ofinsult newspaper, The Grand Teton, devoted to one issue: hating John D. Rockefeller Jr., Horace Albright and the National Park Service. It wanted no part of a national park devoted to preservation of the valley.

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These 20 years of The story of Grand Teton park is fury and resentment one of hard-fought conservation reached a crescendo in battles, historian Robert Righter 1950 when President says — and the war isn’t over yet.

Harry S. Truman signed the Grand Teton National Park Act. The act did not end the anger, but a community of common sense ultimately prevailed.

Namely, people accepted that conservation had economic value.

Locals began to realize that their prosperity would come not from minerals, lodgepole pine forests, or cowboys and cattle, but from tourist dollars. When a team of economists in 1959 determined that 72 percent of the basic income of Teton County came from tourism, criticism of the new park began to dissipate.

Since its creation, Grand Teton has grown in stature and visitation.

It is a mecca for rock climbers, hikers and wildlife watchers. It is a mountain landscape unsurpassed in the United States. The park is one of the nation’s most notable conservation victories. And it has slowly become a place not of conflict, but cooperation and accord.

What does the future hold? Early this year the National Park Service issued an invitation: Help us celebrate — visit a park. The public has responded … perhaps too much. Are we “loving our parks to death?” Superintendent David Vela notes that in 2015 more than 4.5 million people visited Grand Teton. He fully expects See Preserve on 5

Preserve

Continued from 4 that the 2016 figure will top 5 million.

What are the unintended consequences of this influx? Grand Teton is a relatively small park of 306,000 acres. How will greater crowds affect our treasured wildlife? What do more people portend for the visitor’s experience?

The large Western parks have always featured a quality natural experience with reasonable solitude in an atmosphere of quiet and reflection, and the hope of a wildlife sighting. But is this possible today? It surely is getting more difficult. Airport noise denies us solitude. Bear jams often result in anger rather than wonder. An overflowing parking lot at Jenny Lake forces us to consider whether the quantity of people is suppressing the quality of Nature.

There is hope. The park is increasingly using forms of technology to alert visitors of overcrowding. Perhaps a drive on the inspirational Antelope Flats Road would be preferable to fighting the crowds at Jenny Lake. Efforts to encourage visitation to sites such as Schwabacher’s Landing, Emma Matilda and Two Ocean lakes, Blacktail Ponds, the Swan Lake Trail and other seldom-visited places may be an antidote to excess numbers. Visits to such out-ofthe-way places will provide experiences unavailable at Jenny Lake.

And yet we know that people will be drawn to the primary features of the park, and there we must rely on the “wildlife brigade” and the newly formed “lake brigade” to do their best to resolve a bear jam or bring order out of chaos on a warm Sunday afternoon at String Lake.

It is going to take the cooperation of all of us park lovers to

Wyoming's

guarantee a worthwhile park experience. In this new century, we may still have rights, but we also have responsibilities. Park visitors must respect the resource. The Park Service is charged by the 1916 Organic Act to maintain the natural resources for future generations.

We must respect that goal. There may come times when the wellbeing of our animals takes precedence over the rights of tourists to see them. Even today we see the occasional closure of the MooseWilson Road to accommodate the appetites of bears.

As we look to future challenges, we can’t ignore climate change.

Global warming is happening. Fly-fishing on the Snake River may be limited by warming waters. The Teton glaciers will soon be gone and snow will be scarce in August. Park forests may become further ravaged by the pine beetle. Portions of the Snake River riparian meadows are being replaced by thistles and knapweed. In one way or another global warming will affect all of the living entities of the park, and Park Service managers will have to react, again weighing the needs of the resource against the expectations of the public.

In the meantime, Jackson Hole residents will have to be vigilant and engaged. It is quite true that Grand Teton National Park belongs to all the people, but we who are its neighbors have a greater obligation. There are many challenges for our parks, from population pressures to starvation budgets. Let us pay attention and, when appropriate, commit our time, resources and energy to resolving such problems.

Robert W. Righter is a historian who specializes in the American West and environmentalism. He is the author of more than a half-dozen books, including the seminal history of Grand Teton National Park’s creation, “Crucible for Conservation.”

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Bradly J. Boner

Evolving ethics shaped parks Although of very different beginnings, Grand Teton and Yellowstone are guided by similar principles.

By Mike Koshmrl

N

early a century and a half after its formation, people still challenge Yellowstone National Park’s claim as the world’s first national park — the place where preservation for preservation’s sake began.

Mongolia’s Bogd Khan Uul National Park, some have argued, came first. Others have said that, long before 1872, European royalty set aside swaths of land that in essence functioned as protected parkland.

But none of the arguments that Yellowstone staff historian Lee Whittlesey has heard hold any water.

“This one was first,” Whittlesey said. “Everything else was much younger.

“I’ve been investigating this for 45 years now,” he said, “and I can’t find anything that shows another national park … was established anywhere else before Yellowstone.”

It was the northwest corner of the Wyoming territory, where mud boiled and water spouted in breaks in the lodgepole pine forest, that the federal government decided a high plateau ought to be set aside so the people of the United States could enjoy its splendors forever.

When Nathaniel Langford took over as Yellowstone’s civilian superintendent 144 years ago he had no budget, no facilities and little support from the few residents of the area. He was, however, at the 6

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helm of the world’s first Yellowstone and other national national park. parks have set visitation records Although Grand annually for the past several years.

Teton National Park’s Protecting parks from the very official beginning didn’t people who love them most may come for another 58 be the National Park Service’s years, its founders were biggest challenge as it enters its motivated by similar second century. fundamental fears: that development and humans would mar a landscape that had captured the hearts of many, historian Bob Righter said.

But in Grand Teton, mankind had already made its mark.

“When they came here and started a park, in many ways it was the antithesis of Yellowstone,” Righter said. “Most of it was homesteaded, and there were cattle ranchers and people eking out a living by running a few cows and being guides and so forth. There was a lot of private property, and so when it became a park they tried to get rid of that private property.”

While Yellowstone’s 2.2 million square acres were set aside all at once, Grand Teton came in phases and with a fight every step of the way. The initial 1929 congressional designation of Grand Teton park’s first 96,000 acres did little to quell the call for more protected land in See History on 7

History

Continued from 6 Jackson Hole, Righter wrote in his 1982 book, “Crucible for Conservation.”

“Many residents believed that the 1929 park settlement portended a new era of stability,” the historian and Moose resident wrote. “They were wrong. Neither the National Park Service nor the conservationists clustered about the leadership of John D. Rockefeller Jr. were satisfied.

“The grim specter of development haunted them,” Righter wrote. “Jackson Lake, the Snake River and thousands of acres of sagebrush and wooded lands remained unprotected.”

It would take another 21 years to secure the protection of the lower-elevation fringes along the mighty Teton Range.

An evolution of policy The conservation of Yellowstone and Grand Teton and the two parks’ resources has very much been an evolution that has reflected advances in science and shifts in what’s accepted socially and politically.

Wildlife was protected from hunting in Yellowstone within a year of the park’s formation.

Hoofed herbivores like elk, pronghorn, bighorn

sheep and mule deer found a sanctuary rare for the day, and the last remaining wild herd of bison was brought back from the brink of extinction within park bounds.

But the predator species, for decades, were still in the crosshairs. From 1900 to 1935, Yellowstone scouts and officers employed by both the U.S. Army and later the National Park Service killed more than 100 wolves, 100 mountain lions and 4,000 coyotes, according to historian Paul Schullery’s “Searching for Yellowstone.”

“We have spent the rest of the century trying to understand what that campaign of destruction cost us,” Schullery wrote.

Yellowstone’s Whittlesey said it took a long time for science as a field to mature in general — and that lag clearly encumbered conservation in the park.

“The science was really in its infancy right up until 1910,” Whittlesey said. “When Yellowstone was established there basically were no separate fields of science. If you wanted to be a scientist you went to med school, and then from there you could move on into plants or rocks or any other field of science and you basically were blazing a trail in that field.

“To be perfectly honest, the National Park See History on 8

Elk run along the Gros Ventre Road in Grand Teton National Park. As part of its enabaling legislation, Grand Teton holds a controversial elk hunt every fall — what it calls a “reduction program” — in what officials say is necessary to control numbers. Opponents claim the hunt is no longer necessary. price chambers

2016 Edition | Headwaters

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History

Continued from 7 Service, which is celebrating its 100th year, was originally pretty bad in using science,” he said, “just like the Army before it had been and the civilian superintendent before the Army,” he said. “But that wasn’t really their fault.”

Science and wildlife Over the years, decision-making in Yellowstone became more reflective of best-available science. In 1931, National Park Service Director Horace Albright issued a policy statement that cemented the role of scientific opinion in park management. Part of Albright’s dictum was to protect predator species, which he wrote were to be “considered an integral part of the wildlife protected in national parks, and no widespread campaigns of destruction are to be countenanced.”

Coyotes, however, weren’t entirely spared. The year Albright’s policy was published, Yellowstone staff killed 145 coyotes in the park, according to “Searching for Yellowstone.”

Because Grand Teton didn’t come about until deeper into the 20th century, there was never the all-out war on the already dwindled numbers of predators that resided on parkland farther south in Teton County. Pioneering biologists such as the Murie family and brothers Frank and John Craighead took up residence in the area and espoused using science in management.

Protecting Jackson Hole’s critters has also always been hardwired into the valley’s residents, Righter said.

“Wildlife, I think that’s one thing that most everyone in Jackson Hole agrees is important,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if they’re conservative or liberal or rich or poor, everyone in Jackson pretty much loves wildlife.

But, the devil is in the details, and the devil has been mainly the elk hunting issue that came out of the 1950 park law.”

The state of Wyoming is pro-hunting and the National Park Service is against it, Righter said, and no real inroads have been made in ceasing the park’s annual fall elk hunt, which Teton park officials call a “reduction program.”

“That’s been an ongoing issue,” Righter said, “that I don’t think will ever be totally resolved.”

Politics prevails When Grand Teton managers have faced crossroads, conservation hasn’t always won the day. Politics sometimes have prevailed. Jackson Hole Airport’s current location — on a 533-acre lease from the park south of Moose — came to mind for Righter.

“That was a definite defeat for conservation,” Righter said. “The airport, in my estimation, should be down in Alpine. It was the pressure of business. By that time the ski area was beginning to take off and it brought in the tourists.”

The commercial airstrip within the national park has since been overlooked as a threat to the purity of Grand Teton, he said. A report Teton leaders drew up in the early 1960s outlined all the problems the park faced.

“And the airport was not mentioned,” Righter said. “They just didn’t recognize it, and frankly, I think at that time, they didn’t recognize that internal combustion engines could be a problem, whether it was a snowmobile or a jet-ski. Those things were all welcome. They forgot about solitude in a national park.”

In the late 1970s, the Park Service announced it would close the airstrip when its lease expired in 1995, but James Watt, the Interior Secretary See History on 9

Inside the park, outside the park... it’s all one to wildlife.

Protection shouldn’t stop at the park’s border.

Local expertise, national clout.

Since 1919, the nonpartisan National Parks Conservation Association has been the leading voice of the American people in protecting and enhancing our National Park System. NPCA, its members, and partners work together to protect parks and preserve our nation’s natural, historical, and cultural heritage for our children and grandchildren.

Locally, Grand Teton Field Office works to protect wildlife and their migration corridors, preserve air and water quality, oppose harmful development proposals, protect threatened park inholdings, and advocate for strong national legislation that preserves and provides adequate funding for Grand Teton National Park and our cherished National Park System.

Find out more at www.npca.org/parks/grand-teton-national-park.

Grand Teton Field Office • 1160 Alpine Way, Suite 2E, Jackson Hole, WY 83001 • 307.733.4680

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bradly J. Boner

History

Continued from 8 under President Reagan, Jackson Hole Airport is the only quashed the plan. commercial airstrip in a national Ye l l o w s t o n e park in the U.S., a concession made managers, likewise, have that many see as a conservation also faced crossroads and failure. taken routes that led away from the preservation of park resources, Whittlesey said.

“We didn’t always take the right path, but that’s just how it’s going to work in the human condition,” he said. “But in my opinion, through time, generally park managers were headed toward what I call ‘doing the right thing.’ Fortunately, the language in the original Yellowstone Act was so strong that everyone who went back to look at it couldn’t always ignore it.”

The fight for the future Threats to the conservation of Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks figure to persist well into the future. Some challenges — like anthropogenic climate change and the ripple effects warming temperatures will have on northwest Wyoming’s ecology — will be difficult to combat on the local level.

But other troubles the parks face in the 21st century may have more straightforward management solutions. An oft-stated threat nowadays is overuse, and the idea that the parks are being “loved to death.” Grand Teton and Yellowstone each easily set visitation records in 2015, and in 2016 both are trending to surpass last year’s numbers by a considerable margin.

“The numbers are incredible,” Righter said. “We are beginning to love our parks to death. When a park becomes a city, you’re losing why you came there, in a way.”

In Yellowstone, Superintendent Dan Wenk has been steadily spotlighting overcrowding as a threat to the park.

“There’s a plan, ‘Find Your Park,’” Wenk told a panel of Western governors at a June meeting in Jackson. “In Yellowstone, we say, ‘Please find another park.’”

Although visitor caps and crowd-mitigation strategies have been talking points, the National Park Service doesn’t have much of a track record on limiting tourism in its first park unit.

“Historically, we never have done that,” Whittlesey said. “It’s going to be difficult to enforce such a thing with five entrances. How are you going to manage it?”

But if overcrowding is determined to be a threat to preserving See History on 10

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bradly J. Boner

History

Continued from 9 Yellowstone unimpaired for future generations, and if history is any precedent, managers will do what needs to be done to protect the land.

While Grand Teton has taken its blows, Whittlesey could think of no major lasting losses for conservation in Yellowstone’s storied history.

“I think what it’s based in is longer federal-government-exclusive jurisdiction,” the Yellowstone staff historian said.

In hindsight Yellowstone managers, he said, have long been successful in fending off the desires of outside interests. One example played out in the mid1920s, when Rexburg, Idaho, beet farmers tried to get a reservoir built in the southwest corner of the park on the Bechler River so they would have a stable supply of water for their cropland.

“It was a huge deal in Congress,” Whittlesey said. “It got argued over for years. And Congress beat it. They finally said we’re not putting a reservoir in here. … Yellowstone stood firm.”

Grand Teton, of course, has had its major conservation victories, too.

If not for the 1950 expansion of the park to 310,000 acres, the flatlands in the heart of the Jackson Hole valley extending to the shorelines of Jenny and Jackson lakes could be full of mansions and commercial development instead of the relatively undisturbed expanse of sagebrush and forest that exists today.

“I always really praise the Park Service and the Rockefellers for taking the gumption, the energy and the money to preserve it,” Righter said.

“It wasn’t easy. Wyoming people, they appreciated this place, but they 10

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did not think protecting Established in 1929, Grand Teton it should interfere with National Park originally protected making a living. the core peaks of the Teton Range.

“It was inevitable From the late 1920s into the that this place would 1930s, John D. Rockefeller Jr. have been somewhat of quietly bought ranches and other a tourist destination,” private lands, eventually donating Righter continued, “but most of it to the National Park Service and leading to an expansion I don’t think it was of Grand Teton’s borders in 1950. inevitable that it would have been as pristine as it is.”

Former Wyoming Gov. and U.S. Sen. Cliff Hansen was one person who stood opposed to the expansion of Grand Teton. Later in life, however, Hansen flipped his stance, his grandson, today’s Gov. Matt Mead, said.

“My grandfather made clear that he was on the wrong side of that, and he recognized that and how glad he was that he lost that battle,” Mead said in a June press conference in Jackson.

Mead recalled how his grandfather felt pride for being able to say that people would come from all over the world to share the “slice of heaven” that is Grand Teton National Park.

“How special is that?” Mead said.

Mike Koshmrl is the environmental reporter for the Jackson Hole News&Guide. An outdoorsman, Koshmrl spends his time learning about the people and places of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Bob Allen

Yellowstone’s competitive advantage Economist Ray Rasker examines the enduring connections between healthy towns and public landscapes.

By Todd Wilkinson

R

ay Rasker is keenly aware of the negative aphorism, the one often associated with economists, that condemns his profession for sometimes “knowing the price of everything, but the value of nothing.”

Rasker, an economist with a Ph.D. from Oregon State University’s College of Forestry, is a pioneer in not only thinking about the worth of intangible things in the environment, which often do not show up in financial ledger sheets, but more importantly understanding how the natural world factors into the well-being of local economies — and vice versa.

A quarter century ago, Rasker had just started as the first staff economist for The Wilderness Society in Bozeman, Montana. He had begun divining insights that made him an enigma and an outlier. He remembers the polemical, intractable wars of rhetoric being waged between environmentalists and bean counters beholden to traditional natural resource extraction industries.

“Here in Greater Yellowstone, voices in the conservation community would say that the region’s economy was powered by tourism,” he explains. “Meanwhile, those who gauged wealth

only on resources Ray Rasker with his dog, Ollie, on being pulled from the Mainstreet to the Mountains the ground and trail system near his home in consumed said, ‘Oh, Bozeman, Montana. no, prosperity is only created through ranching, mining and logging.’ I said, ‘You’re both missing the point. There’s something else going on.’”

At that point, people on both sides thought Rasker was speaking heresy. Time has both corroborated his hunches and placed him in a new vanguard. Today, Rasker has just returned to his office at Bozeman-based Headwaters Economics, an independent environmental-economic think-tank he co-founded, after being in Washington, D.C. There, Rasker delivered a keynote address before high-level natural resource policy experts at the White House. He had an audience with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and their top lieutenants.

The focus of Rasker’s words: America needs to be smarter about how it manages the wildland-urban interface in the West, See Rasker on 12 2016 Edition | Headwaters

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Rasker

Continued from 11 the zone where public and private lands converge, because the escalating costs of battling wildfires is devastating the budgets of land management agencies. It’s a conundrum because, as an unprecedented wave of humans is now inundating forested terrain in search of the good life, climate change is leaving those zones more prone to burning.

But before wading into the mire of America’s growing crisis for how to deal with wildfire, it’s important to understand how and why Rasker became an unlikely figure in the discussion. It has to do with his belief that the health of natural landscapes and sustainable economies functions like yin and yang.

It’s a relationship made manifest in Greater Yellowstone, he says, and it’s especially poignant as the most influential generation in U.S. history — the baby boomers — flexes its power in retirement.

In the early 1990s, as the front wave of boomers (those born between World War II and roughly 1964) began to assert themselves as entrepreneurs and also to enter retirement, their presence in Greater Yellowstone registered as a rumble that today is seismic.

Rasker relates a figure that some elected officials view with incredulity, but hard facts bear him out: Today in the West, only 9 percent of the workforce is employed by the natural resource industries. Some 60 percent of new net income is derived not from retail, manufacturing or high-tech, but from retirement and investment among baby boomers.

The upshot is that this injection of money is coming directly from wealth created by smokestacks. The downside is that the retirees and people who make money on financial investments are buying land and exacting growing footprints on the natural world by how they live and recreate.

Jackson Hole is an extreme example of disparity existing between the upper 1 percent and the rest. Elsewhere in Greater Yellowstone, be it Bozeman, Cody, Red Lodge, Lander or West Yellowstone, it’s the upper 30 percent — and typically a huge percentage of baby boomers — settling in Greater Yellowstone.

“It’s a tsunami, and the biggest part of the wave is yet to come,” Rasker says, noting that development of land is its own form of resource extraction with permanent consequences.

Over the last several years, Rasker and his team at Headwaters Economics found that crunching statistics has led them down several different rabbit holes, all of which have yielded a connect-the-dots bigger picture. Their main clients: government agencies at the federal, state, county and municipal level. “Our goal is to give partners credible information they can use to identify and solve problems,” he says.

One innovation that Headwaters makes available free of charge is a calculator that enables counties across the West to compile customized socio-economic profiles, which include a look into the value of public lands as job creators (http:// headwaterseconomics.org/tools/economic-profile-system/ about/).

In addition, Rasker and colleagues have uncovered these insights: • Healthy landscapes in the 21st century, like those in 12

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Greater Yellowstone, Rasker says the worth of Grand foster economic Teton and Yellowstone is around prosperity because $1 billion annually, anchored they attract creative to nature-tourism and wildlife people who want to watching. The economic value of live in or near them. nature throughout Greater YelConservation, despite lowstone, he says, “is at least what old-guard three times that.” economists say, is not an economic liability, but can be a tool for driving prosperity and getting out of the ruts of boom and bust cycles.

• The public-land-rich West has not been hobbled by federal ownership. During the last four decades, the West created jobs twice as fast as the rest of the nation, and western nonmetro counties with significant protected federal land added jobs more than four times faster than peers without protected federal land.

From 1970 to 2010, western non-metro counties with more than 30 percent of the county’s land base in protected federal status on average increased jobs by 345 percent. By comparison, similar counties with no protected federal public land increased employment by 83 percent.

Compellingly, Headwaters found that for every 100,000 acres of protected public land found inside county boundaries, per capita income was $4,360 higher.

Another tool that Headwaters has pioneered is a free-touse calculator for measuring the economic value of national parks for local communities across the country (http:// headwaterseconomics.org/public-lands/protected-lands/ economic-impact-of-national-parks/).

The worth of Grand Teton and Yellowstone is around $1 billion annually, anchored to nature-tourism and wildlife watching. Rasker says the economic value of nature throughout Greater Yellowstone “is at least three times that.”

• One of the essential amenities that makes some counties more prosperous over others is having ready access to commercial airports. Entrepreneurs connected to the global marketplace need to have mobility. Just being saddled next to a beautiful place isn’t enough. Overcoming geographical isolation is vital.

• At a time when some lawmakers in the West have pushed to have federal lands divested to state control or have public lands sold off to private entities, portraying federal ownership as an impediment, Rasker has provided a compelling counter argument using economic data.

In fact, he recently penned a letter to President Obama that states “federal protected public lands are essential to the West’s economic future, attracting innovative companies and workers, and contributing a vital component of the region’s competitive advantage.”

The letter was signed by 100 economists, including a trio of Nobel Prize winners. The argument is spelled out in a report, “West Is Best: How Public Lands in the West Create a Competitive Economic Advantage” (http:// headwaterseconomics.org/wphw/wp-content/uploads/West_ Is_Best_Full_Report.pdf).

• The inundation of newcomers, especially well-heeled ones, See Rasker on 14

Rugile Kaladyte

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Rasker

Continued from 12 is not without its significant downsides, which include housing prices being driven up at the expense of working class families and sprawl eroding the wild character of landscapes that draw people there in the first place. In addition, growth drives up the costs and needs for expanded local services. Communities that try to grow their way out of problems only make it worse.

Moreover, Rasker notes, the refusal of counties and municipal governments to regulate the kind of development allowed in the wildland-urban interface has created a dangerous and costly problem with wildfire. The U.S. Forest Service, for example, spends a huge percentage of its budget on fighting fires at the expense of everything else it does.

If, instead of the federal government (i.e., taxpayers) agreeing to absorb fire costs, county governments were forced to pay for firefighting, Rasker believes attitudes about living in the wildland-urban interface would change. A huge dividend of having sensible regulations and forcing county governments and individuals to assume more of the liability is that costly sprawl, which erodes things like wildlife habitat, would also slow down.

Rasker’s insights (made available in a widely viewed PowerPoint summary at http://headwaterseconomics.org/wphw/wp-content/ uploads/wildfire_homes_solutions_presentation.pdf) have found a receptive audience among both fiscal conservatives and greenminded land protectionists.

A sobering message: Currently, only 16 percent of the West’s wildland-urban interface is developed, and yet this small amount

already is driving escalating risks and costs from wildfire exacerbated by climate change. Amid the unprecedented inward growth happening in regions like Greater Yellowstone and other areas of the Rockies, that percentage could skyrocket, and with it could come potentially catastrophic consequences.

Smart growth isn’t only wise to maintain Greater Yellowstone’s rare and unsurpassed ecological integrity — including its wildlife populations — it is a cornerstone of fiscal responsibility.

Chris Mehl is admittedly biased. He works for Headwaters Economics, but he’s also a former congressional committee staffer and he currently sits on the Bozeman City Commission.

“Rasker has devoted his career to helping Western towns and counties access the right information they need to make better decisions and solve problems,” Mehl says. “He understood before most how the economy was changing and what these changes would mean for communities large and small.”

Going forward, communities that protect the quality of life of citizens — which almost always have environmental components at their core — are more likely to remain prosperous at a time of huge tumult in the world, Mehl says.

Writer Todd Wilkinson has been writing about the environment for 30 years. He lives in Bozeman and is a correspondent for National Geographic, the Christian Science Monitor and numerous other national publications. He also is author of the awardwinning book “Grizzlies of Pilgrim Creek, An Intimate Portrait of 399, the Most Famous Bear of Greater Yellowstone,” featuring 150 photos by Thomas D. Mangelsen.

Helping Jackson Hole choose to reduce their energy use since 2011 EnergyConservationWorks.org 14

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jim peco

Peering into the future Researchers provide a glimpse at the effects of climate change on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

By Cory Hatch

I

A firestorm erupts in a lodgepole pine forest on the Mirror Plateau during the 1988 fire season in Yellowstone National Park.

magine a Greater Yellowstone with no moose and no wolverines. The evergreen forests that once dominated Yellowstone National Park are mostly gone, replaced by broad grasslands. Park roads open in early April, and fire season lasts into October.

Where forests do persist, the trees are younger. Warm water temperatures and non-native fish have chased the region’s cutthroat trout populations into a few high-elevation refugia. The high-pitched harmonizing of boreal chorus frogs has disappeared from the few remaining wetlands.

The above scenario is admittedly an imperfect prediction of what Greater Yellowstone will look like in 100 years, but it isn’t exactly science fiction.

Some changes are happening already. Snow melts earlier in the spring, summers are warmer, and we now have longer growing seasons and fire seasons. On average, male grizzly bears are leaving their dens earlier. Pika population declines are linked to warmer summer temperatures.

But that’s just the beginning. Researchers estimate that climate change will, on average, make the Northern Rockies 8 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by 2100. The Earth is heating up at a faster rate than it has for millions of years. This temperature rise means See Climate on 16 2016 Edition | Headwaters

15

Ryan Dorgan

Climate

Continued from 15 substantial changes for ecosystems all over the planet, including Greater Yellowstone.

Researchers have spent the past 30 years trying to figure out how human-caused climate change will impact plants and animals in the region. Their best educated guesses give us a glimpse of the future of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

The ’88 Yellowstone Fires If there’s a single event that sums up the past and the future of climate change in the Greater Yellowstone region, it’s the 1988 Yellowstone fires.

Three months of unusually hot, dry, windy weather turned park fuels into a tinderbox and fanned the flames of numerous individual lightning starts and escaped campfires. The resulting conflagrations consumed nearly 800,000 acres of Yellowstone habitat. Pundits deemed the park “destroyed.”

Meanwhile, many ecologists quietly rejoiced: Theories about the power of fire to rejuvenate the landscape would be put to the test. The ’88 fires marked a new era for fire ecology and fire management.

That same year, climate scientists throughout the globe began in earnest to ring alarm bells about human-caused climate change. The accumulation of evidence since the 1970s and earlier pointed to an increasing level of anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Those scientists said the corresponding rise in global temperatures posed a risk to the health and security to humans across the planet. The 16

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Intergovernmental Panel Moose in the Greater Yellowstone on Climate Change was region may be especially formed and researchers susceptible to warming and other began asking difficult effects of climate change. questions about what the planet would look like after the expected and possibly inevitable rise in global temperatures.

Two of those researchers, Dr. Monica Turner and Dr. William Romme, focused their attention on post-fire Yellowstone. At the time, climate change science was in its infancy. In 1992, the researchers published in the first issue of the journal Yellowstone Science some predications about the potential effects on climate change in the park, among them: 1) Whitebark pine and alpine meadow habitats will shrink or disappear; 2) tree lines would move up mountainsides; 3) Douglas fir and other lower-elevation forest types would expand their range in the park.

Despite those predictions, early on Turner and Romme thought Yellowstone in 2100 would look similar to the Yellowstone we know today.

“In all cases, our computer models suggested that the system would be very resilient and it would recover even in a warmer climate much like we saw after the 1988 fires,” Turner said. “When we had been working on our models, we were still staying in the range of conditions that had been observed in the last 10,000 years.”

The problem with those models was the 10,000-year assumption.

Scientists now suspect that global temperatures could move beyond anything the planet has experienced in the last 10 millennia.

See Climate on 17

Climate

Continued from 16 In 2008, a researcher named LeRoy Westerling drove this point home when he showed Turner an updated map of climate predictions for the latter part of this century. By that time, Turner said, average summer weather conditions Yellowstone will closely resemble those experienced in the summer of 1988.

If that’s true, the increase in fire intensity and frequency may not bode well for Yellowstone National Park’s evergreen forests. If fires burn the same locations in the park more frequently, young trees might not get the chance to grow big enough to produce cones. The resulting grasslands might support ungulates such as elk and bison just fine. But animals that depend on forests — old-growth obligates such as wolverine, lynx and many species of raptors — might lose big chunks of habitat. Unfortunately, those forest species are often endangered, threatened or species of special concern.

Last summer, Turner and Romme revisited their 1992 predications in a special climate change issue of Yellowstone Science. On the whole, the predictions researchers made in 1992 still hold up.

One of those predictions has, in fact, already come true: An explosion of mountain pine beetle activity, compounded by a non-native fungus called blister rust, has decimated whitebark pines in the Northern Rocky Mountains. Researchers say warmer winter temperatures have failed to keep the beetle population in check.

Moose and other mammals Pine beetles are just one example of how warmer temperatures

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Climate

Continued from 17

Contact us to plan your experience at The Murie Center. muriecenter.org

307-739-2246

The conservation ethic that the Muries embodied, and the passion and the commitment that they shared with others, inspired a generation of leaders.

Today The Murie Center of Teton Science Schools is proud to carry on this important work.

“When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. ” - ALDO LEOPOLD

Thank you to hundreds of community members who volunteer for the Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation's Wildlife Friendlier Fencing program and Nature Mapping Jackson Hole. We are grateful for your commitment, and honored to contribute to this wildlife-friendly community. www.jhwildlife.org P.C. Mark Gocke

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might make life easier for insects and harder for their hosts.

Jackson Hole’s moose population has, in recent years, suffered a significant decline in numbers. Similar trends have wildlife managers worried across the northern United States. The reason for this decline is complicated. Locally, increased predation by the reintroduction of wolves and the expansion of grizzly bears is a factor, but climate change could be what eventually pushes the population over the edge to extinction.

Part of the problem is ticks. A moose with too many of the parasites during the winter can loose its hair and freeze to death.

“Winter ticks are exacerbated by shorter winters and earlier springs,” said Wyoming Game and Fish biologist Alyson Courtemanch. “Deep freezes can kill the ticks or knock back the tick population.”

On the other hand, a warmer spring — like the one Jackson Hole experienced in 2016 — allows ticks to drop off onto dirt instead of snow. On dirt they stand a better chance of laying eggs and successfully reproducing.

“There are going to be a lot of ticks that are ready to latch onto moose next winter,” Courtemanch said. “The more years we have like this, the worse the tick problem is going to become for moose.”

In general, moose are simply better adapted to colder temperatures.

When it’s too warm, they spend more time in the shade trying to cool down and less time feeding, Courtemanch said.

“The warmer winters and warmer summers are incredibly stressful to them,” she said. “They’re so heat-stressed all the time. It cascades into poor body condition for females, and that impacts their ability to have a calf. They are so stressed they can’t put on enough weight every year.”

Furthermore, if forest fires increase, that precious shade will begin to disappear.

“That’s really going to impact their ability to have shade and stay cool during the summer,” Courtemanch said.

For moose, all this heat adds up to less food and more stress, weakening their ability to fight off diseases and parasites.

Wetlands Evergreen forests aren’t the only habitat type facing potential declines due to climate change. Wetlands may be particularly vulnerable.

Biologists have noticed a concerning trend with Greater Yellowstone’s wetlands: “[I]n the driest years, approximately 40 percent of Yellowstone’s and Grand Teton’s monitored wetlands were dry by June or mid-July,” wetland researcher Andrew Ray wrote in the 2015 climate change issue of Yellowstone Science.

While depressional wetlands — those without any flowing water — only cover 3 percent of the landscape in Grand Teton and Yellowstone national park, they support a wildly disproportionate share of their plants and wildlife. Thirty-eight percent of Yellowstone’s plant species and 70 percent of Wyoming’s birds use those wetlands as habitat, as do all five species of Yellowstone amphibians.

Yellowstone’s amphibians, in turn, serve as prey species for an array of wildlife, including birds, mammals and snakes.

If hot, dry conditions become the norm — a high probability — wetlands may disappear too early in the summer to provide good habitat for the vast number of plants and wildlife species that depend See Climate on 19

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Continued from 18 on them.

Even without the drought conditions that some climate scientists anticipate for the region, wetlands could still dry up. Warmer temperatures could accelerate the evaporation of water from ponds earlier in the summer, said Debra Patla, a research associate with the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative and co-author of the paper.

Patla worries most about amphibians like the boreal chorus frog.

“It takes them a large part of the summer to develop from tadpoles into frogs and toads,” she said.

If amphibians metamorphose at a time when the weather is really dry — when wetlands are smaller and may be dried up altogether — there may not be enough water to carry them through to adulthood.

“The survival of the young of the year is really influenced by the weather in summer, late summer and early fall,” Patla said. “I’m convinced that we’re going to see a lot of mortality. The dry, hot weather is just murder for them.”

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Other habitats Wildlife managers say virtually every habitat type and scores of individual species are facing some level of disturbance as temperatures warm. In the parks, researchers have shown that rivers and streams are peaking earlier, that water temperatures are warmer and that glaciers are melting, according to Sue Consolo-Murphy, chief of science and resource management for Grand Teton National Park.

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In the Greater Yellowstone and across Wyoming, we’re working to ensure nature and people can thrive.

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THE NATURE WE DEPEND ON DEPENDS ON US.

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bradly J. Boner

Climate

Continued from 19 “We clearly already see evidence of climate change in the ecosystem,” she said.

Fish are particularly threatened.

“Temperatures are warming in the streams and there may be less water overall,” Consolo-Murphy said. “That means that fish are more likely to seek refugia in the upper elevations.”

Those warmer conditions may also make it easier for non-native species such as rainbow trout to move up the watershed into habitat for native fish such as cutthroat trout. Grand Teton officials have worked with several partners to remove barriers to fish movement such as dams so native fish have more high-elevation, cold-water habitat to escape to when water temperatures warm.

Plant communities may face challenges from more than just heat and lack of water. Grand Teton’s Kelly Hayfields provide good habitat for lots of species, including bison and songbirds. But park officials are concerned the quality of that habitat could suffer as the climate warms, Consolo-Murphy said.

“There’s a lot work on pollinators,” she said. “If plants green up and flower two weeks early, are the pollinators tracking that or are they out of sync?”

Disturbances in these plant communities clear a path for non-native species such as cheatgrass.

Climate change in the park may affect the timing of yet another species: humans. Warmer temperatures, combined with an overall increase in park visitation, means more park visitors in the spring and 20

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fall. The onset of tourist Researchers have shown that the season “used to be flows in rivers and streams in and Memorial Day,” Consoloaround Grand Teton National Murphy said. “It’s been Park have been peaking earlier in early May more recently.” the year and have warmer water Instead of chilly temperatures. temperatures during peak foliage season each fall, “now people can come and they don’t need their winter coat,” Consolo-Murphy said.

“Late summer and early fall is a very stressful time for wildlife,” she continued. “That’s when wildlife are looking more aggressively for food sources. Does [an extended tourist season] also have some effects on wildlife? We don’t know a lot about those kinds of things.”

Complex interactions Another unanswered question is how all the climate change impacts in Greater Yellowstone would interact.

“So many of these changes are all interconnected,” said Corrina Riginos, a researcher with the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative. With Teton County Commissioner Mark Newcomb, Riginos is co-lead author of a 2015 review paper on the impacts of climate change in Teton County.

For example, warmer winter temperatures may start a cascade of impacts, starting with more precipitation falling as rain instead of snow.

More rain leads to less snowpack, which in turn leads to lower water levels in creeks and rivers. The lower water levels contribute to warmer water temperatures. The increased frequency of forest fires reduces the See Climate on 21

Climate

Continued from 20 shade on creeks and rivers, leading to even higher water temperatures.

“It feels like everything is kind of tied together,” Riginos said. “It makes it a little hard to make predictions. There could be feedback mechanisms that could lead to more rapid changes.”

Just how sure are we?

Exhaustive research has confirmed the basic facts about global climate change science. Hundreds of scientists pursuing multiple avenues of investigation have converged on a single conclusion: Human greenhouse gas emissions are heating up the atmosphere.

The future of Greater Yellowstone is less certain. The severity of climate change impacts here and around the planet depends heavily on mankind’s ability to substantially curb greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades.

Even if future emissions were known, predicting the future climate on a relatively small landscape like Greater Yellowstone is difficult. For example, shifting ocean currents may change weather patterns on the landscape in unpredictable ways.

The wildlife managers and researchers who study the region sometimes disagree on how a complex ecosystem like Greater Yellowstone will respond to warmer temperatures.

“What we need to do first is put ourselves in a position to see if these projections are coming to fruition,” said Yellowstone National Park biologist Roy Renkin, who is working his 38th fire season this year in the park.

For example, competing evidence shows that the increased fire

frequencies predicted by Turner and Romme may not occur, Renkin said.

“These young forests that are establishing now after the ’88 fires, they’re really hard to burn,” Renkin said. “Those conditions like we saw in ’88 we’ve seen less than 98 percent of the time in the past 40 years.

We really need to pay attention and be doing things on the ground that can show that the hypothesis holds true or doesn’t hold true.”

As researchers continue to gather more data and refine their computer models, land and wildlife managers can take steps to help species remain on the landscape. The effort to open up more fish habitat in Grand Teton National Park by removing dams and other obstructions is a good example. Protecting migration corridors for species such as elk, deer and pronghorn can help them find new homes if traditional habitats become unsuitable.

State and federal agencies can even attempt to repatriate species if their populations plummet or if they become extinct. There are currently several efforts to replant whitebark pine trees in various parts of the ecosystem. Researchers have developed blister-rust-resistant whitebark seedlings that they hope will replace forests ravaged by the pine beetle outbreak. Assisted migration is another species management option.

But Renkin hopes that those sorts of more intensive management efforts won’t occur everywhere.

“I’m a proponent that, in places like Yellowstone, we want to let the process take its course,” he said. “There’s some enlightenment, I guess, in trying to be a little more passive. It affords a great opportunity to learn.”

Cory Hatch is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in U.S. News & World Report, MSNBC online and Jackson Hole Magazine.

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The synergy of beauty Wilds draw artists who, in turn, show others the value of conservation.

By Kelsey Dayton

R

“Swan Ponds” by Kathryn Mapes Turner was inspired by Jackson’s landscape and wildlife.

The emphasis on conservation in the area provides inspiration for Turner’s work, she says.

azor-sharp peaks towering over swaths of open space have lured people to Jackson for more than a century.

It is easy to understand why artists draw inspiration from the scene, too, and why conservationists work so hard to protect it.

“It’s the two things that make Jackson Hole special,” said artist Kathryn Mapes Turner, a valley native. “Conservation and art both exist here. They both thrive here. They are both valued here. Both nature and art stir a very deep part of our hearts. The natural world connects us with a deeper part of ourselves, and that deeper part can be expressed through art.”

For generations, art and conservation have maintained a symbiotic relationship in Jackson Hole and the surrounding area.

From the painters and photographers who first documented the thermal features of Yellowstone and the pinnacles of the Tetons, to the more recent efforts by artists to document the valley’s open spaces, the environment has drawn and inspired people who render it, in turn reminding others of the value of conservation.

It is obvious that successful conservation efforts are what has made Jackson a special place that draws visitors from around the world.

The efforts of previous generations to protect the landscape were successful in preserving what makes Jackson unique, Turner said.

But those efforts might not have started if the area’s early artists hadn’t used their talents to show the world what lay west beyond the roads and railroad tracks.

The most direct example of art’s influence on conservation is Thomas Moran’s paintings of Yellowstone, which helped convince Congress to create the world’s first national park.

In 1870, the Washburn expedition to Yellowstone included several untrained artists who created crude sketches, said Lee Whittlesey, Yellowstone National Park historian.

Yellowstone was still a place of myth and legend at that time.

When Truman C. Everts, a member of the expedition, returned East, he wrote an article about his misadventures getting lost for more than a month in what would become Yellowstone National Park. The article appeared in Scribner’s Monthly, which hired Moran to illustrate the story. The article was the first to introduce the world to Yellowstone, and also featured Moran’s first rendering of the area he hadn’t yet seen, Whittlesey said.

When the Hayden Survey went West in 1871, it brought along the photographer William Henry Jackson to visually document the unimaginable wonders of Yellowstone. Moran, an accomplished oil painter who was also known for his wood-cut work, came along as a backup in case Jackson’s photographs didn’t turn out. Photography was still an inexact art and science, plus paintings were a way to capture the colors of the landscape, Whittlesey said. Moran worked in the field with watercolors, charcoal, and pen and ink.

Moran’s paintings and drawings were given to Congress, along with Jackson’s photographs, as evidence of the area’s wonders and the need to protect them for posterity.

Moran was also one of the first established artists to capture the Tetons. It took longer for people to visit what would become See Art on 23

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Art

Continued from 22 Jackson Hole. Even Artist Thomas Moran’s paintings Moran’s first paintings and sketches of Yellowstone helped were captured from convince Congress to set the area the Idaho side of the aside as the world’s first national mountains, said Adam park. Above is “Springs on the Harris, the Petersen Border of Yellowstone Lake,” Curator of Art at the now known as West Thumb; to the National Museum of right is “Tower Falls.”

Wildlife Art. Even after Grand Teton became a national park in 1929, most of America remained unfamiliar with the jagged mountains that would one day become one of the most photographed and painted scenes in the West. The National Park Service realized early on the value in people seeing the remote parks they hadn’t yet ventured to visit. The agency hired photographer Ansel Adams to create images to share scenes of these places and to remind people of their value, even if they hadn’t yet seen them for themselves. His photograph “Snake River Overlook,” which he created in 1942 as part of the project, became one of his most famous and recognizable images and still brings visitors to Grand Teton to seek out the same vantage point and attempt to recreate the picture.

After World War II, people had more money, cars and a desire to explore the country. The parks saw an influx of visitors, including artists such as Conrad Schwiering who built their legacy on their work inspired by the landscape’s grandeur, Harris said.

Today, Jackson’s renowned art scene has expanded beyond images of the area’s peaks to include renderings of open spaces. Conservation and art still have the power to influence each other, a realization of Turner’s that led to View22, a project in which artists render some of the valley’s open spaces to raise awareness about past and ongoing conservation efforts of the Jackson Hole Land Trust.

“I do believe art plays a special role in conservation,” Turner said.

“It can communicate the value of the natural world at a deeper level beyond the mind. I think that’s why it’s particularly powerful. Art See Art on 24 2016 Edition | Headwaters

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A 30 year anniversary of wetlands and species restoration Protecting and restoring wetlands and the species that use them, one wetland at a time

Art

Continued from 23 slows us down, allows Erin O’Connor’s “Lay of the us to take a deeper Land” shows Snake River Ranch look and have a deeper land protected by the Jackson moment of reflection.”

Hole Land Trust.

Turner has made her career using protected lands as inspiration for her art. She feels a debt of gratitude to open space, which sustains her livelihood.

View22 was a way to give back and to continue the relationship between art and conservation by reminding people of the efforts behind preserving the places they might otherwise take for granted.

“It’s this lovely synergy,” said Laurie Andrews, executive director of the Jackson Hole Land Trust. “Artists have been really communicating the beauty and the importance of open space for decades.”

View22 is just one of the latest ways that art and conservation merge in the valley. In its fourth year, 21 artists participated in the project, highlighting protected lands such as the Swan Ponds by Rafter J. The goal, like that of early artists such as Moran, is to invest people in the landscape.

It would be easy for the Land Trust to write a list of all the open space it has saved in Jackson, but pictures communicate it differently, Andrews said.

“I think it makes people stop and look at it in a deeper and more meaningful way,” she said.

Info@wyomingwetlandssociety.org 307-730-4446 24

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Kelsey Dayton in a freelance writer and editor of Outdoors Unlimited. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications including The Washington Post and on Outside Online.

The Picture of Health The rugged terrain and spectacular wildlife of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem makes for a photographer’s paradise. At the same time, the images generated by photographers have played a key role in shaping the region’s conservation legacy.

Using unwieldy and, by today’s standards, primitive cameras, photographers such as Ansel Adams, Stephen Nelson Leek and William Henry Jackson brought Grand Teton National Park, the National Elk Refuge and Yellowstone

National Park to the American public. The American public, in turn, demanded that these natural wonders be preserved for future generations.

To honor that legacy, we asked four local photographers to choose a single image that best sums up what conservation means to them. The pictures are as diverse as Jackson Hole itself, and they tell a conservation story that endures beyond the moment captured with a click of the shutter.

— By Cory Hatch

David Stubbs

Shooting for Conservation Every small effort adds to great impacts.

By David Stubbs

I

think part of making a living in the Greater Yellowstone is trying to mitigate my impact on the ecosystem. I shoot as much conservation work as possible. The experience of dark, solo starts in the morning to shoot unique locations makes for unforgettable work days. To then see these images help raise money for future conservation easements, that is when my work becomes meaningful.

The Jackson Hole Land Trust began commissioning video and stills projects four years ago. Through the people I’ve met and places I’ve explored while photographing for the Trust, I’ve witnessed how conservation ideas become tangible. Giant parcels of private land, crucial for migratory corridors and animal habitat, are negotiated into conservation easements that stay with the land in perpetuity. Easements of spring creeks, meadows and ranchlands bordering wilderness will remain open space.

Protecting these open spaces from development is complicated, especially when the land is worth a small fortune. But open space is vital for the health

of the last intact ecosystem in Fog obscures the valley as the Lower 48. Keeping these viewed from the ridge above the National Museum of habitats available for wildlife is Wildlife Art, a Jackson Hole crucial. This is where we live.

Land Trust property.

The politics of development, environmental policy and conservation efforts remain intensely polarizing here and across the country. Private development interests, housing shortages and worker shortages complicate the issue. Meanwhile, the booming economy steams ahead. Jackson may be the biggest small town in America. The Greater Yellowstone needs every small, individual conservation effort it can get as our impact only grows larger.

David Stubbs has worked in more than 20 countries taking photographs for clients as wide-ranging as National Geographic and The New York Times to Outside Magazine and Le Monde. He is based in Jackson Hole.

2016 Edition | Headwaters

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Mark Gocke

Making memories Shooting with a camera or a rifle deepens a relationship with the land.

By Mark Gocke

T

he Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is an amazing living, breathing expanse of rugged mountain wilderness. I feel lucky to live here. I get out and enjoy it to the extent my time, money and body will allow. I have experienced it by car, by foot, on skis, on horseback, in a boat, even by air on occasion, and almost always with a camera. It’s what I love to do.

When asked to submit just one photograph, with a few words, to convey why the GYE is special to me it seemed impossible. But somehow I settled on this photo of my friend Jim Collins packing out a bighorn ram he had just taken deep in the Washakie Wilderness north of Dubois. This is classic Yellowstone country — big mountainous terrain, often with hostile weather, that can make you feel pretty small.

While there are other beautiful mountain landscapes in the Lower 48, what sets the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem apart is the great abundance of wildlife it supports. Species such as bison, grizzly bears and trumpeter swans are hallmarks, but maybe the species I admire most is bighorn sheep. They live in some of the most beautiful yet inhospitable terrain our planet has to offer — the vertical cliffs and spires above timberline.

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What’s even more Jim Collins heads home after a amazing is that many successful bighorn sheep hunt in spend the entire winter the Washakie Wilderness north up there, which seems of Dubois. unthinkable.

I will always love to view and photograph wildlife, but hunting them is an entirely different experience. Participating in the predator-prey relationship, and possibly taking an animal’s life, is a very personal and profound experience. And for many, the rare opportunity to hunt bighorn sheep in a setting as beautiful and challenging as the mountains of the GYE is the ultimate outdoor experience. My sheep hunt in 1992 is still easily one of my most memorable.

I sincerely hope this amazing landscape and all its wildlife continue to flourish for my kids to enjoy, whether it be through hunting, photography or just simply watching them from time to time.

Mark Gocke is a dad, husband, nature photographer, mountain biker, skier, hunter and lover of a good cold microbrew who also works in Jackson Hole as a public information specialist for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.

Wild sentience Co-existing with the wild says a lot about who we are.

By Thomas Mangelsen

S

o much of what we strive to do as nature photographers goes beyond the technical aspects of making a great, enduring picture. I’m not just searching for “the perfect moment” to illustrate natural history for the sake of documentation. For me, it is about bringing together fine art and scenes that encapsulate something greater, so that every time you return to the image on your wall it causes you to think or pause or have a rush of joy or maybe reflect on your own place in the world.

In this photograph of Jackson Hole grizzly 399, chosen as the cover image for my award-winning book “Grizzlies of Pilgrim Creek,” I hoped to convey the family values of an extraordinary mother bear and move viewers past their knee-jerk human instinct, built upon mythology, of automatically maligning grizzlies as menaces.

As a matriarch, 399 deserves our respect for being a caring, protective mother, but she also is a sentient being with an emotional range, intellect and aptitude the likes of which humans are only beginning to understand and appreciate. Co-existing with grizzlies says a lot about who we are. If I have succeeded, even modestly, in helping to convince people to care more for these amazing, iconic creatures in Greater Yellowstone, at a time when so many large carnivores globally are in peril, then I will be happy.

Nature photographer Thomas D. Mangelsen has traveled throughout the natural world for more than 40 years observing and photographing the Earth’s last great wild places.

Grizzly 399 and her cubs of the year (2013) walk down Pilgrim Creek Road in Grand Teton National Park.

THomas Mangelsen

2016 Edition | Headwaters

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Mike Cavaroc

Dark Skies It’s the one natural resource the entire planet has in common.

By Mike Cavaroc

T

he night sky is one of our most valuable natural resources. It’s filled with infinite exploration and discovery, and the best part is you don’t need a science degree or any celestial knowledge to appreciate it. But thus far only a handful of people in Jackson Hole have given attention to it.

A few simple facts are enough to open anyone’s mind to the magic and wonder that the night sky contains. While a drive to darker skies in Teton Park is doable for most, there’s no reason people can’t enjoy similar skies in their own backyard each and every night.

Reducing light pollution in town has the added benefits of preserving property rights and property value, increasing public safety by reducing distracting glare, reducing adverse health effects to humans and wildlife, saving energy and adding another valuable component to our community’s character and identity.

Learning about this information led me to show more of what’s at stake as development worldwide 28

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continues to sprawl.

Airglow casts a green I wanted to show haze in the night sky as the night sky as it the Milky Way stretches is, uninterrupted in above the mountains of all its majestic glory.

Grand Teton National At the same time, Park.

I wanted to help people understand that, while some light will still spill off from town, a great night sky from downtown Jackson is still easy to achieve with proper guidance.

The night sky has been one of the most effective sources of inspiration to guide both spiritual and scientific advancement. A dark night sky is something everyone should have easy access to, because without it we lose a crucial component of our humanity. With easy and cost-effective solutions, we can help preserve the one natural resource that the entire planet has in common.

Mike Cavaroc is a Jackson Hole nature and night-sky photographer who spends much of his free time hiking and volunteering behind the scenes for Wyoming Stargazing.

Bradly J. Boner

Subdivisions in the crosshairs Jackson Hole’s devotion to fending off development goes back decades, and there’s no end to the battle in sight.

By Mike Koshmrl

B

The Jackson Hole Land Trust has protected more than 23,000 acres in Jackson Hole from development, including 1,840 acres of open space on the Walton Ranch near Highway 22 between Wilson and Jackson.

y the late 1970s, the year-round economy in Jackson Hole was gaining strength, outsiders were funneling into the valley, land values were climbing, and increasing pressure was on ranchers and landowners to subdivide.

Residents of the day could see that the homogenous suburban sprawl creeping through much of the United States threatened to spread into Teton County.

“There were a bunch of things that people liked about the way the valley was,” former resident and Sierra Club activist Phil Hocker recalled, “and they were afraid it would go away if we had subdivisions across every hayfield.”

The community rallied in a big way, mounting an impressive push for the preservation of the valley’s privately owned pastoral landscapes. Pressure from the public and the Teton County Board of Commissioners led to a 1978 bill dubbed the “Jackson

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Bradly J. Boner

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Hole Scenic Area,” which would have armed a working group of federal, state and local officials with $200 million — then an incredible sum — to preserve working ranchland and other open spaces in perpetuity through scenic easements.

As ambitious as it was, the plan almost materialized.

“It passed the House and it would have passed the Senate,” Hocker said, “but [U.S. Sen.] Cliff Hansen blocked it.”

The rise and fall of the Jackson Hole Scenic Area proposal speaks to the community’s steadfast devotion to maintaining its unique character and rural nature. Just a few years before the scenic bill flopped, Grand Teton National Park had studied an expansion of its boundaries for the same reason. And very shortly after, in 1980, the Jackson Hole Land Trust formed.

Jean Hocker — Phil’s wife — was a co-founder.

“We found out that the land trust model was working in some other places,” Jean Hocker said, “and having tried and failed to get federal legislation and federal funding, we thought this would be the best way to keep some of the land undeveloped and give the ranchers other choices.”

Fast forward 36 years and the trust, now led by Laurie Andrews, has protected more than 23,000 acres in Teton County.

That’s nearly a third of the relatively scant private land tucked within the county’s nearly 2.7 million acres, which is 97.2 percent publicly owned.

The secured properties create a patchwork of protection along 30

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the Snake River plain.

Bill and Story Resor stand on While they’re most a piece of their conservation concentrated in central property just south of Jackson Jackson Hole, the Hole Mountain Resort. The Resor parcels also extend family — which owns the largest down to Hoback estate of land in Jackson Hole Junction, up the Gros — has placed 40 percent of its Ventre River corridor properties under protection with and into the Buffalo the Jackson Hole Land Trust, Valley. which Story co-founded in 1980.

Efforts to protect the historic viewscapes aren’t slowing. Last year the Land Trust secured 388 acres — more than half a square-mile of land — primarily on the Mead Ranch up Spring Gulch Road.

Andrews said she feels strongly that the community prioritizes protecting its “character-defining” landscapes. Imagine, she said, a subdivision at the Hardeman Meadows just outside of Wilson.

“Would that change this place as we know it?” Andrews asked.

“Dramatically.”

The successes of the trust and other land conservers are due in large part to the willingness of Jackson Hole’s land-rich residents to waive the right to develop their land. Bill Resor, whose wife Story Clark co-founded the trust with Hocker, is in charge of an estate that started out as the 400-acre Snake River Ranch in the early 1930s. Today, the Resors are the largest landowning family in the valley and have made significant strides toward forever preserving their property’s open spaces.

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“We have protected about 40 percent of the land we own with conservation easements of one type or another,” Bill Resor said, noting that the family’s protected land totals more than 2,500 acres.

Much of the reason, he said, is because it’s the Resors’ desire, even though many family members with a financial stake live outside of the valley.

“Frankly, it’s easier to get family agreement, I’ve found, on preserving land than it is on developing land,” Resor said. “When we find an opportunity to preserve land that works, for whatever reason, it has been easy to get consensus.”

Outside of his family’s holdings, Resor was impressed with the lengths to which the community has gone to keep pastureland part of the landscape.

“I think Jackson Hole has done better than probably any other mountain community as far as preserving private open space,” he said. “I’ve visited a number of other mountain resorts in the Rocky Mountains and that’s my gut feeling.”

But many residents believe the battle to retain Jackson Hole’s private land character is far from over.

An acute housing crisis in Jackson Hole that only continues to grow worse is piling on the pressure to add significantly to the housing stock — and soon. It has been exacerbated by a trend toward less dense development: In the 1970s a typical subdivision came with about a house an acre; by the 2000s, new luxury developments like Bar BC Ranch were registering more

like 35 acres per residence, Resor said.

Franz Camenzind, the now-retired longtime leader of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, sees that shift as a doubleedged sword.

“Would I have 35-acre lots with $10 million mansions on them that are only occupied a month a year?” Camenzind asked.

“Or would I rather see 50 housing units on 35 acres, with extra traffic every day and extra impact on our school system and infrastructure?

“I don’t know,” he said.

One benefit of modern-day development, in Resor’s view, is that it better protects habitat and the wildlife that depends on open spaces.

“You put one house in a big open meadow, it doesn’t really bother wildlife,” Resor said. “But we all like to see big open meadows.

“In the future,” he said, “the scenic values are more sensitive and will require more active protection than the wildlife values.”

Regardless of what development looks like down the road, one thing is certain: There will always be pressure to develop.

“They certainly have done an amazing job of conserving a lot of the land,” Jean Hocker said of the Land Trust, “but there are parcels … that are still vulnerable that are there to be developed if the landowners are willing to do that.

“Every piece of open space that’s not conserved is being eyed by somebody for development,” she said.

Two of the largest developable tracts are situated not in See Development on 32

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Thank you for supporting conservation in the Tetons

Visit tetonwyo.org/recyclE AND howdoyouRRR.org or call 733-7678 to learn more about programs and services offered by Teton County Solid Waste and Recycling 2016 Edition | Headwaters

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South Park or West Jackson, but within the confines of Grand Teton National Park. After a decade of deliberation, the federal government still hasn’t been able to come up with funds to purchase two state-owned sections of land that Wyoming is mandated to maximize revenue from to help fund education.

Auctioning the parcels to the highest bidder, likely a developer, would provide a considerable return, but a plan is in place to buy one of the square-mile parcels, at Antelope Flats, for $46 million.

The Grand Teton National Park Foundation has committed to raising half the sum, with the rest coming from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund. The foundation in late August hit the halfway mark of its goal, but still needed to raise more than $10 million by the end of the year to finish the deal.

“Those parcels in the park are not protected,” Jean Hocker said.

In addition to the school trust land there are another 900 acres of privately held inholdings within Teton park borders, she pointed out. That private land includes a second square mile of Wyoming-owned land near Kelly. The plan to purchase that tract and the source of the money to do so are still hazy.

“Are they all going to fall tomorrow?” Hocker said. “No, probably not, but they’re all vulnerable and it will come down to what people making decisions do today.”

Mike Koshmrl is a reporter on the environmental beat for the Jackson Hole News&Guide. An outdoorsman, Koshmrl spends his time learning the people and places of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Bradly J. Boner

A small herd of elk grazes in the Hardeman fields near Wilson.

The conservation easement under the Jackson Hole Land Trust protects the area from development and preserves a wildlife migration corridor as well as scenic open space.

Craighead Beringia South, Putting Science to Work For Wildlife Since 1998!

Current Projects Include: -Non-invasive Carnivore Monitoring -Teton Kestrel Project -Golden Eagle Nesting Ecology -Blacktail Butte Raptor B Community Project -Integrated Research and Education Program For more information, go to: www.beringiasouth.org 6955 E 3rd St. Kelly, WY 83011 (307)734-0581

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Ryan Dorgan

Opinion

What do grizzlies need? A future.

By Caroline Byrd

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n 1980, I started patrolling trails in the backcountry of the Shoshone National Forest. I will always remember chasing my packhorse down the North Fork of Crandall Creek in the middle of the night after he pulled his picket. Then I stopped in my tracks. I realized he had been spooked by a grizzly. I quickly retreated back to my camp and waited until morning to go after the horse, finally finding him seven miles down the trail.

Back then seeing a grizzly was rare. But today, the Shoshone has the greatest grizzly density of any place in the Lower 48.

Anybody who lives or recreates in Greater Yellowstone, and especially in Jackson, knows that we have witnessed increasing grizzly bear numbers in the past 40 years. This slow and steady expansion is prompting us to be more “bear aware” and to do smart things like carrying bear spray when we hike, bike and hunt. Grizzlies have made a remarkable comeback in the Greater Yellowstone. This is a success for bears and for the Endangered Species Act. And now it’s up to us to keep bears alive and to continue this success.

How do we do that? For the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, it means three things. First, reducing conflict — promoting and funding work to keep bears wild and people safe, like bear-proofing

campgrounds and The famous bear sow known as working with Grizzly 399 lumbers through ranchers to keep bears Pilgrim Creek with her cub of the and cows separate. year in May 2016. The cub was Second, protecting killed later in the summer after the big, wild spaces being struck by a car. where grizzlies live.

Third, ensuring Yellowstone grizzlies can reconnect (after nearly a century of isolation) with bears from northwest Montana’s Northern Continental Divide population.

However, there is another crucial yardstick: making sure the management of grizzly bears in the future honors and continues the successful conservation legacy of the past. This critical factor hinges on the process that is currently underway to delist the Yellowstone grizzly from the Endangered Species Act and transfer management to Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.

Before I give you my take on the current state of the delisting process, let me first explain why I think it is so important to get this right. The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is different.

This is not Nebraska, Connecticut or California (no offense intended to those splendid states). This is the birthplace of the world’s first national park and of America’s commitment to See Grizzly on 34 2016 Edition | Headwaters

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Grizzly

Continued from 33 conservation. It is one of the last places on the planet where wild nature still exists and is constantly on display. And the grizzly bear is the iconic symbol of Greater Yellowstone, the wild heart of North America.

We have carefully reviewed all of the state and federal proposals that will make up the management plan for a delisted Yellowstone grizzly bear. We have attended public hearings and numerous meetings of agency leaders where key provisions in this plan are being negotiated. Unfortunately, at the most recent meeting, we learned the states have no intention of honoring the past four decades of grizzly bear conservation. This became evident when representatives from Idaho, Wyoming and Montana proposed striking any mention of maintaining a stable population of grizzly bears from post-delisting management plans. This is categorically unacceptable.

The goal of maintaining a stable population of grizzlies has been an expectation from the outset. When in our nation’s history have we spent 40 years and more than $40 million to bring an endangered animal back from the brink of extinction only to intentionally drive the population downward?

If you care about bears, we urge you not to sit out this debate. We need to closely watch the process, hold the agencies accountable, and demand that, at a minimum, the states commit to managing for a stable population of grizzlies. We’re not asking for thousands of bears in Greater Yellowstone before delisting occurs. We realize most of the available grizzly habitat is occupied and that there will always be

a need to manage bears, including removing individuals when they get into trouble with humans. But arbitrarily driving bear numbers down is not something the vast majority of the American public will support, and certainly not the many conservation groups deeply involved in this process.

I’m proud of how far we’ve come in my lifetime. Over the past 40 years, we have proven we can live Caroline Byrd of the Greater with grizzly bears.

Yellowstone Coalition says grizzly Like many, I want my bears are an iconic symbol of daughter to experience North America’s wild heart. the thrill of being in grizzly country and watching bears in the wild. We don’t want our children to go back to a time when the ultimate symbol of wildness was rare, even in the wildest country. We can do better.

Caroline Byrd is the executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition.

What Makes a Bank a “Local Bank”?

Ask the Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation.

JHWF Volunteers from left to right: Gretchen Plender, Carol Schneebeck, Chuck Schneebeck, Randy Reedy, Debbie Kopp, Dennis McCracken, Shirley Cheramy, Bob Kopp, Doug Sobey

Live your Jackson Hole Lifestyle, Leave the Banking to Us

As private land uses have shifted in the valley requiring less fencing, many land owners have turned to the Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation to modify or remove fencing to better accommodate the wildlife migration. Founded in 1993, JHWF works to promote ways for people to live compatibly with wildlife; be it “Give them a Brake” signs on roads to help reduce deadly vehicle-wildlife collisions or 184 miles of fence removed by local volunteers. Bank of Jackson Hole shares this same vision of removing unnecessary barriers to its banking products, services and staff so as not to fence in our customers.

www.bojh.com

307-732-BOJH

Invest in Our Community WeBank answer Local to

no one but you.

Headquartered in Jackson Locally Owned and Managed 10 Branches 17 ATMs Commercial Loans Real Estate Loans Mortgage Loans Main Branch 990 West Broadway 733-8064

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Town Square Branch 10 East Pearl St. 733-8067

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Wilson Branch 5590 West Highway 22 733-8066

Smith’s Food & Drug Branch 1425 South Highway 89 732-7676

Hillside Facility 975 West Broadway 734-8111

Teton Village Branch 3300 West Village Dr. 734-9037

Aspens Branch 4010 W. Lake Creek Dr. 733-8065

We are concerned about Wyoming’s declining wildlife.

THESE NUMBERS ARE NOW BELOW POPULATION OBJECTIVES ANTELOPE OBJECTIVE: 38,000 — count 32,000 DEER (WYOMING RANGE) OBJECTIVE: 50,000 — count 34,000 ELK NORTH OBJECTIVE: 11,000 — count 10,600 SOUTH OBJECTIVE: 4,400 — count 3,800 MOOSE TETON CO. OBJECTIVE: 3,600 — count 228 GAME & FISH COUNT 19 calf elk per 100 cows, NATL. ELK REFUGE COUNT 16/100

Ken Griggs, DVM says less than 20% is dangerously close to no herd survival!

There are multiple reasons for these declining numbers, such as over-harvesting does and cows, residential development in wildlife corridors and migration routes, highway collisions, interference from the federal government and environmental activists that have prevented state predation management, and insufficient supplemental winter feeding on the National Elk Refuge, where the calf elk mortality is now 8.9, due to malnutrition and starvation.

The National Elk Refuge was established in 1912 by an Act of Congress to feed the wintering elk.

Of the 75 years of records kept, an average of 7,500 elk have been fed there every year. In the past the Wyoming Game & Fish Dept. shared management, with each paying half the cost of feed. Now the N.E.R. claim this is exclusively their feeding program and say they want to lower the number to 5,000 via starvation!

This is purposeful destruction of Wyoming’s assets. Wildlife is a renewable resource that belongs to Wyoming.

Some years ago Professor Mark Boyce, while at the University of Wyoming, valued one elk worth $10,000 to this state’s economy.

Wildlife was not enumerated in the U.S. Constitution, therefore management is a State Right, even on public land within state borders. The 5,000 number is not a foregone conclusion-that is yet to be determined.

Concerned Citizens for the Elk is asking the Wyoming Game & Fish Commission and Governor Matt Mead to act with authority in the best interest of the state.

Information provided by Concerned Citizens of the Elk: Directors George Johnson, Dan Bess, Joanna Johnson, Art Andersen, Gloria Lorenzo.

Concerned Citizens for the Elks is a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of Wyoming’s native wildlife. Donations are tax-deductible and are much appreciated.

2016 Edition | Headwaters SaveTheElk.org 35

Kill Us And You Could Be Killing A Big Part Of Our Economy 8,400 Furbearing Animals Killed by Traps Last Season. And that’s a low estimate. Because with the exception of bobcats, the Game and Fish Department relies on trappers to report voluntarily.

And less than 38% bother to report. Who knows how many foxes, mountain lions, dogs, eagles, and owls are indiscriminately caught and killed. No other state in the lower 48 has the wildlife we have. It’s what makes this place special. Tourism is Wyoming’s second largest industry.

And wildlife viewing is a big chunk of that. It’s vital to our economy to sustain a diverse, thriving wildlife population. If you agree that our wildlife is more valuable alive and protected rather than cruelly exploited, please donate to Wyoming Untrapped. And help us make trapping reform a reality.

PhotograPhy: ©thomas D. mangelsen

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WyomingUntrapped.org

Wyoming Untrapped.org