The Dallas Business Journal is pleased to announce Hillwood Development Company LLC, (Developer of the Bar BC Ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming) as one of the honorees for the 2012 Healthiest Employers.
The Healthiest Employers program is powered by Indianapolis-based Healthiest Employers LLC, and recognizes organizations that are committed to creating a healthy workplace based on criteria including culture and leadership commitment, strategic planning, communication, interventions and reporting.
Companies will be honored at a luncheon and health fair at the Marriott Dallas City Center on April 12 and featured in a special publication of the Dallas Business Journal on April 13.

ELK REFUGE CHAINS TARANTINO, BUT HE GETS HIS SHOT

 JACKSON HOLE NEWS & GUIDE

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2012

 Elk refuge chains Tarantino, but he gets his shot

 Brielle Schaeffer and Cory Hatch

 Director Quentin Tarantino wrapped filming for parts of his latest movie, “Django Unchained,” in Jackson Hole last week, with plenty of shots of snow, the Tetons and even elk.

 The director decided to shoot five scenes instead of an originally planned three at the private Bar BC Ranch on Spring Gulch Road, Mary Jane Ashmore, the ranch’s marketing manager, said.

 After seeing elk on the National Elk Refuge, filmmakers asked to have actors ride among them, but they settled for a less intrusive shot on the reserve.

 In all, the production spent more than $500,000, rented 100 rooms at Snow King Resort for about a week and also filmed in Grand Teton National Park.

 At Bar BC Ranch, the crew filmed for about five days, Ashmore said.

 “They had some scenes in mind that were specific to an ambush and a rambling scene with the Tetons in the background,” she said.

 Based on a 1966 Italian-made spaghetti Western, Tarantino’s feature is about a slave-turned bounty hunter, starring Jamie Foxx in the title role. Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell and Sacha Baron Cohen also have roles.

 Location scouts stumbled upon the Bar BC Ranch when they were trying to get better access to the Walton Ranch, Ashmore said. But “it just so happened the two locations they spotted [on Bar BC Ranch] were exactly what they were looking for.”

 The crew built a cabin near a pond on one part of the 1,400-acre property, Ashmore said.

 Hillwood Communities, which owns Bar BC, donated $10,000 to the Jackson Hole Historical Society from the proceeds paid by the film, she said. Some 150 cast and crew members were part of the production that filmed on the ranch last week, Ashmore said.

 Tarantino’s production company hired several residents for crew work, Michelle Howard of the Wyoming Film Office said. The company also brought in veteran movie horse wranglers Robin and Kate Wiltshire from Turtle Ranch near Dubois.

 The throngs of elk and bison on the National Elk Refuge inspired a new scene for Tarantino’s movie, refuge officials said.

 “This site was not planned originally, but when the director saw all the elk along the highway, they wanted to have all their actors walk in and among the elk,” refuge manager Steve Kallin said. “Then they wanted to ride horses in and among the elk.

 “We said no,” Kallin said. “They wanted to do some things around the sleigh ride area, which would have caused disturbance.”

 However, refuge officials did agree to let the film crew shoot some footage with elk and bison in the background. The crew staged in a “remote location” while roughly six crew members, two actors and two horses went out to the shoot, Kallin said.

 “We had them go to our northern feedground,” Kallin said. “There’s a hunter access road there. They sat just on the edge of that road.”

 The area is normally closed to the public during the winter, but Kallin decided to grant the crew a permit because there would be little if any impact to wintering wildlife. Kallin couldn’t say how much the refuge charged for the permit. Refuge staff were on hand during the shoot.

 “We did have very tightly controlled access and ensured there was no disturbance to the elk or bison,” he said.

 Tarantino’s crew shot the footage just after the elk had been fed. While the elk were still standing in the feeding area the actors “rode the horses a short distance between the camera and the herd,” Kallin said. “Their crew was very respectful and followed our instructions explicitly.”

 The movie could bring good publicity to the refuge, Kallin said.

 “There may be some benefit to the refuge in having … a bunch of wintering animals in a major film,” he said. “We could potentially see a little bump in our sleigh ride visitation.”

 The production also shot some scenes at Kelly Warm Springs in Grand Teton National Park. Park officials granted the production a film permit for a couple locations there earlier this month.

 The crew stayed at Snow King Resort while they were in town. Dana Ahrensberg, general manager of the resort, said Tarantino’s crew had little downtime but was able to ski at Snow King and the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort.

 “They work really hard when they were working, and then they had Jackson Hole to relax in when they’re not,” he said. “That was not their original plan, to come to Jackson Hole. It’s lucky we had the best snow in the country.”

 The filmmaker also rented out the Teton Theatre Feb. 6 and 7 to play Western and samurai movies from Tarantino’s collection, a Jackson resident who worked as a production assistant and spoke on the condition of anonymity said.

 The production crew had nothing but positive things to say about the locations, Howard said.

 “Everyone said they were very pleased with the shots they got,” she said. That was despite temperatures that dipped into the negative 20s near the end of the shoot, she said.

 The production company spent more than $500,000 in Wyoming, which qualifies it for a cash rebate of  up to 15 percent of those expenses, she said. The state’s Film Industry Financial Incentive program requires a production spend $200,000 or more to qualify for the rebate.

 “We will be working to process their expenses and receipts in the coming weeks,” Howard said

 

Grant Helps Grand Teton National Park Re-sod Historic Dude Ranch Cabins

Submitted by NPT Staff on February 4, 2012 – 1:47am

A grant from the National Park Foundation will allow designers to come up with sustainable roofing to replace sod roofs on historic cabins in Grand Teton National Park. NPS photo.

 

Funding through the National Park Foundation’s 2012 Impact Grant program will enable Grand Teton National Park crews to replace sod roofs on historic cabins at the Bar BC Dude Ranch with a grass system that’s more resilient to the weather.

This project, “Greening the Bar BC: New Green Roofs for Old Sod Cabins in Grand Teton National Park,” is part of the Foundation’s Impact Grant program that gives parks the critical financial support needed to transform innovative, yet underfunded ideas into successful in-park programs and intiatives.

“Grand Teton National Park continually looks for fresh ways to incorporate sustainable design into new construction,” said park spokeswoman Jackie Skaggs. “This project proposes to integrate sustainability into the treatment of the park’s historic structures as well, and the Bar BC Dude Ranch—home of Struthers Burt, one of the valley’s most prominent conservation thinkers—makes a logical choice for such a novel approach in the preservation of an historic structure.”

The $9,200 grant will pay for installation of a roofing system that involves grass, “geofabrics” to prevent water infiltration, and “data loggers to detect water infiltration through the roof, and lightweight modern building materials to avoid adding too much weight to the delicate structures,” according to Katherine Longfield, the park’s cultural specialist.

“The idea of using modern green roofs on historic cabins is innovative in and of itself however. We don’t know of anywhere else where this is being tried,” she adds. “We modeled it off of an archeological conservation technique where conservators ‘green cap’ fragile archeological walls rather than cement cap them as they have found that the organic material can be more beneficial for the wall than cement.”

Grand Teton will partner with the University of Pennsylvania’s Advanced Conservation Lab to design and install green roofs utilizing modern technology on historically sod cabins and study the performance and success of this roofing system as a preservation treatment.

During the coming summer, students, faculty, and park staff will work collaboratively to test this novel approach to stewardship on one of Grand Teton’s few nationally significant properties, the Bar BC Dude Ranch. If successful, the park will have identified a sustainable, low-cost, historically accurate roofing system for over 40 structures slated for preservation. This approach may be applicable elsewhere across the National Park System.

Hillwood Communities: The Bar BC Ranch 2012 Calendar Enjoy our community of Bar BC Ranch in Wyoming with a calendar! About Bar BC Ranch: The 1400 acre Bar BC Ranch is located in one of Jackson Hole, … www.slideshare.net/…/hillwood-communities

 

Yellowstone visitation tops 3 million in 2011: Article from the JH News & Guide

 

 

January 7, 2012

Yellowstone National Park visitation in 2011 topped the 3 million mark for the fifth consecutive year.

Overall visitation to Yellowstone for 2011 was 3.39 million people, the second highest visitation on record, according to a park statement released Thursday. Visits were down 6.8 percent from the record 3.64 million people who visited the park in 2010.

More than one-fourth of the park’s total annual visitation was recorded during the month of July, with 906,934 recreational visits. December visitation was down 5  percent compared to the same month last year, with 16,509 visitors recorded in 2011 compared to 17,386 during the same period in 2010.

The last time the park recorded fewer than 3 million annual recreational visits was in 2006, with 2.87 million visits.

Words from the Wild

Cadre of accomplished writers discovered Jackson Hole early on

By Elizabeth Clair Flood

The Bar BC Ranch was established in 1912 by Maxwell Struthers Burt and his fellow Philadelphian, Dr. Horace Carncross.

(page 1 of 5)

About the time Gertrude Stein composed the romantic line “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”—and invited Lost Generation writers and artists like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Picasso into her chic Parisian salon on 27 rue de Fleurus—another significant literary get-together was taking place far away. This one was much more rustic in style; in some ways, however, just as glamorous, as a sophisticated crowd of artists and writers gathered in Jackson Hole.

In the early 1900s they came to the valley to hunt, fish, write, and, in some cases, gather information for Saturday Evening Post articles or for their own books about the West. One of the big names was Owen Wister, author of The Virginian, the first true western novel. Wister stayed at the valley’s earliest dude ranch, the JY, on the banks of Phelps Lake, while building a cabin for his family. Others on the scene not long after included Ernest Hemingway, in the throes of writing A Farewell to Arms; the prominent publisher Alfred Knopf; Western writer Wallace Stegner; and historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Bernard DeVoto.

Jackson Hole, frequented by trappers, outlaws, big game hunters, and cowboys, was very much “undiscovered” in the early 1900s, still the Far West of Theodore Roosevelt. To get here it took four or five days by train from the East, then a few more days in a covered buckboard over dirt roads. This small group of sophisticates, philosophers, poets, and some of the top people in publishing and politics—for the most part, Philadelphia socialites like Wister—sought out this valley, a place romanticized as the last of the Old West by Roosevelt and artists like Thomas Moran, Frederic Remington, and Charlie Russell, and photographer William Henry Jackson. These were people who crossed the Atlantic on steamers and engaged in the creative movements in Europe, but also chose trail riding with cowboys, dancing the Charleston inside rough-hewn cabins, and singing “Ten Thousand Cattle” around a campfire under starry skies.

The man responsible for many of these visits to Jackson Hole was the valley’s second dude rancher, another prominent Philadelphian named Maxwell Struthers Burt. An award-winning novelist and one of Charles Scribner’s Sons top authors, he shared the prestigious editor Maxwell Perkins with the likes of Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Burt wrote numerous popular novels, articles for The Saturday Evening Post, short stories for literary magazines, and many poems and songs. His best known books, Diary of a Dude Wrangler (1924) and Powder River (1938), became classic Wyoming histories.

On Burt’s first ranch, the Bar BC, and later in the 1930s on his Three Rivers Ranch, he provided family, friends, and colleagues with rustic retreats where they could experience the West. The remoteness attracted the visitors.

As one early Bar BC visitor reported, “We were so far away from home base we could have been in Tibet for all we knew.” 

Burt’s wife, Katherine Newlin Burt, grew up in Fishkill, New York, and met her future husband at Oxford. She was one of the first at the Bar BC to write about the West as it unfolded, literally in her backyard. She traveled to Jackson as Burt’s fiancée in 1912, then returned as his wife in 1913 to help him run the Bar BC. That fall Nathaniel, their first child, was born on the kitchen table. Their daughter Julia was born on the ranch a few years later.

Katherine loved her life on the ranch. “In the summer Mr. Burt and I are in the saddle most of the time,” she wrote in a 1919 letter to a publicist inquiring about her lifestyle. “In winter we make writing our only business. We go straight to our desks after breakfast—housekeeping is a trifle spasmodic and mending is not at all—and write until lunch. … Mr. Burt goes back to his desk after lunch, but I don’t. The greatest necessity to me for writing is a great deal of leisure …”

By the end of the decade, Katherine’s first novel, The Branding Iron (1919), a western romance set in Jackson Hole, was published. It became a best seller and was made into a Hollywood movie by Samuel Goldwyn. At the height of her career, Katherine was also the fiction editor of Ladies Home Journal. She wound up writing more than thirty books, including three children’s books in her late eighties, and did most of her research right from their ranches in Jackson Hole.

“The branding incident [the idea for The Branding Iron] was suggested by a story told to me by one of our cow-boys—a true and very grim story, much grimmer than I have it and rather different,” she wrote. “This extraordinary country has material for a hundred novels.”

In this same letter she credits her husband for her success: “My greatest inspiration is my husband—his mind, his encouragement.”

So many others who came to visit, attracted by Struthers Burt’s charismatic personality, must have felt the same way.

The great-grandson of a fur trapper and a nephew of a California rancher, Burt had a passion for a simple, western way of life in his blood. “I only knew that I wanted to live in the West and that I wanted to write,” he wrote in his celebrated book, Diary of a Dude Wrangler. He also was influenced by romantic notions of the West at the time.

“My grandfather would most definitely have read Owen Wister’s Virginian and been captivated by the stories of the western frontier,” said Struthers’ grandson Chris Burt. “He also would have been influenced by the movement West inspired by newspaper editor Horace Greeley [who wrote] ‘Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.’”

As a restless youth, Struthers Burt went on a number of hunting trips out West. On his first visit to Jackson, he came down from a ranch in the state of Washington, where he had been working. He took the train to St. Anthony, Idaho, then traveled for three days in a buckboard down primitive country roads and over Teton Pass in mud “hub-deep.”

“The white-top came to the summit of Teton Pass, up through the forests of the Targhee, and suddenly I looked down on one of the most hair-raising views in the entire world; a view so beautiful and breath-taking …” he wrote in a letter to the Jackson Hole Courier in 1948. “I took one look, and I’ve been here ever since.”

The year Burt arrived was 1908. Soon after, he and his good friend and fellow Philadelphian Dr. Horace Carncross, one of the first American students of Sigmund Freud, moved into the JY. The two men worked for the ranch for a few summers and Struthers formed a short-lived partnership with the ranch owner, Lew Joy. It was here that the young Burt spent time with Wister, who was staying at the JY in 1911 and 1912 while building a home for his family. They rode horses together; chewed the fat. For a young writer like Burt to spend time with Owen Wister, the writer who established the model for literary cowboy heroes—and at the time was the most widely read novelist on either side of the Atlantic (The Virginian was in its fortieth printing)—well, it must have made some impression.

It’s written that Burt’s wife also had the opportunity to meet Wister. Riding into the JY, she fell off her horse and slid right into a man standing in the corral. As she pulled herself out of the dirt, she saw Wister looking down at her, taking notes.

Wister was first in Jackson on a hunting trip in 1887. He continued making visits to Wyoming, where he “tasted air he had never breathed before,” and discovered the land that his daughter, Francis Stokes, called “the country of [my father’s] choice.” Much of the research for his seminal western novel was gathered in Wyoming. Although not every trip West was spent in Jackson Hole—The Virginian was set in and around the southeastern Wyoming town of Medicine Bow—he wrote fondly of his trips to this valley and to Yellowstone. He even buried his main character in the novel here.

“He loved Jackson Hole better than any place in the world,” Stokes wrote.

He loved the place enough to bring his entire family out—wife May Channing, and five children—nearly thirty years after his first visit West. He introduced them to the country he loved; even fly fished for trout for his family dinners. Sadly, his wife died in childbirth in 1913 and he never returned to live in the two-story home they had built. The cabin became part of the R Lazy S dude ranch, and was later moved to Medicine Bow in the 1970s.

When the partnership with Lew Joy proved too difficult, Struthers Burt and Dr. Carncross went out on their own, in 1912 opening the valley’s second dude ranch, the Bar BC, the initials coming from the pair’s last names.

Located on the west side of the Snake River in the evening shadows of the Tetons, the Bar BC under their management was a profitable enterprise and glamorous destination throughout the 1920s. Dudes came mostly from the East to have a ranch experience. They rode horses and slept in cabins or out under the stars. The early guest lists included artists and writers, and read like a social register: Francis Biddle (later Attorney General of the United States under Franklin D. Roosevelt); lawyer-writer Tucker Bispham, a disciple of writer Max Beerbohm; the Peabodies of Groton School fame; and portraitist-painter Adolph Borie. These individuals, along with many other men and women, found Jackson Hole to be exotic; its beauty, immeasurable.

“Wyoming is too beautiful for a person of imagination to be much concerned about anything else,” said one painter who was among Burt’s earliest guests.

Choosing rustic living over a pampered city life, woolly chaps over Chanel, the first guests were an eccentric, albeit educated, bunch. Taken by the beautiful scenery but dedicated to the study of classics, a Dr. Woodward, from yet another Philadelphia family, rode his horse backwards with his legs crossed over the cantle, reading Shakespeare to his family. One of the Bar BC’s most flamboyant dudes, Cissy Patterson, a recently divorced countess (and later the editor of the Washington Herald), hunkered down in a tent reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace to her cowboy lover as a snowstorm raged outside.

“Nobody had heard of Jackson before the thirties except our dudes and a few others,” wrote Burt’s son, Nathaniel, in his book Jackson Hole Journal. “To us on the ranch it seemed the hub of the universe, the center of a kingdom that was mostly wilderness stretching in every direction, and which we felt was ours, all ours, as far as the eye or fancy could reach.”

In 1929, Struthers Burt, tired of dude ranching and wishing to have more writing time, purchased two homesteads near Moran. In 1930, he took on as associates five other families, mostly friends from the Bar BC, and created the Three Rivers Ranch, a private retreat named for its proximity to the Snake River, Pacific Creek, and the Buffalo Fork.

“By this time both my parents had become very successful authors,” wrote Nathaniel; “my father as best-selling novelist (The Interpreter’s House, 1924; The Delectable Mountains, 1927; Festival, 1931) and as a prolific writer of short stories and articles. My mother was a novelist, short story writer, and creator of serials for women’s magazines.”

At Three Rivers Ranch, Burt “carried the atmosphere of the dude ranch with him,” his son wrote. Each family constructed its own hand-hewn cabin. The families and their guests gathered in a main cabin with a dining hall, a seating area around a stone fireplace, and desks for writing. Indian artifacts, instead of Renoirs, embellished the walls.

It was at the Three Rivers where Wallace Stegner stayed for a summer and wrote, and where Struthers taught him to fly fish. A.B. Guthrie, Hemingway, the wife of Lewis Sinclair, renowned philosopher Irwin Edman, and editor Maxwell Perkins’ family all visited, as did politician and statesman Adlai Stevenson.

During his years at the Three Rivers Ranch, Burt fought hard to keep the land he loved from being developed. Leaders in the area and in the country, including conservationist Horace M. Albright, gathered at the Three Rivers in seminal meetings that led to the establishment of Grand Teton National Park. It was Burt who first asked Lawrence Rockefeller for help in this endeavor, and who made pleas to the residents to put aside their differences and cooperate in protecting the valley. He understood the importance of open space and nature in people’s lives.

Nathaniel, who essentially grew up at the Three Rivers and wrote there, as well, remembers the witty and bright campfire conversations with great fondness. His mother told ghost stories; others played music or sang songs or just told stories. “The stories were half-hour masterpieces of comic art,” he remembers.

“[My father] really loved to be surrounded by people,” wrote Nathaniel. “He attracted them and hypnotized them and it was his personality that really held the [Three Rivers] Association together.”

The partners in the ranch began growing apart in the late thirties. Struthers Burt died in 1954 and is buried in Jackson. His son continued to write at the ranch, completing nine published books there. Katherine wrote and rode into her eighties, celebrating her ninetieth birthday in 1972. The property was turned over to the National Park Service in 1979, and since then the cabins have been parceled off to different owners around the valley—despite a valiant effort to put the ranch on the National Register of Historic Places for its “indigenous architecture and literary associations.”

Not so long ago, the main cabin, which sits near the Calico Italian Restaurant, was sold to locals Becky Hawkins and Jane Ottman. When the new owners began restoring the lovely old hand-hewn building, they both said they heard voices.

Conversations from the past, no doubt, about things like books, horses, and backcountry.

---

 Jackson Hole, Wyoming  There’s long been a Four Seasons hotel installed at the base of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. Such an institution implies all that one would expect: fancy snacks, celebrity sightings, rich cowboys and s’mores bars — all the normal trappings of your first-tier destination resort.  But the thing that separates Jackson Hole from the rest of North America’s grade-A mountains is that it has, rather impossibly, managed to retain all of its soul.  This is still a place where the best skiers in the world, before skiing off of 50-foot cliffs, gulp down waffles and Budweisers inside a mountaintop shanty called Corbet’s Cabin.  Jackson is still the place with the best backcountry skiing in the world.  It still gets more snow than anywhere not called Alta.  It still has The Tram, the greatest ski lift on earth. For those building their game to rock star level, Jackson’s Steep and Deep camp, which begat imitations across the resort world, provides four days where all skiers can count on improvement.  The program, run several times a year, attracts all different kinds of people with different appetites for risk–the one common theme: everybody is good and trying to get better. Nobody’s too good for Steep and Deep; cheeky campers can have their ego shaved by a trip down the tram fall line with olympic downhill gold medalist Tommy Moe.  The big skill gainers at camp shimmy their ski tips up to the edge of Corbet’s Couloir.  But actually pushing in is another matter.

Its hardcore credentials intact, Jackson has become a place that works well for families.  Its Kids Ranch keeps tots well-fed and weaving through cones on their skis.  It’s the perfect weaning ground for the next Eric Schlopy.  The Bridger Gondola moves people quickly from the base to a point two-thirds up Jackson’s ridiculous 4,139 vertical drop, where the black diamond folk can find thrills and the groomer folk can find long, wide highways all the way down.  About that way down: this is Jackson’s greatest asset.  There’s no hopscotching from fall line to fall line on this mountain.  The entire resort is one contiguous, unrelenting and glorious slope that points where it’s supposed to point: down.  Those searching for wandering, time-wasting cat tracks might want to consider Colorado.  For inquiries on something scenic like a movie (the Tetons), prolific like the Himalayas (450″ of snow) and a fun that’s a little bit different from anywhere else, try Wyoming.

 

An Inland Island
Jackson Hole’s incredible uniqueness is articulated when you consider that we are virtually an inland island.
Today 97% of our land is forever preserved in national parks, national forests, Bureau of Land management
acreage of the National Elk Refuge and conservation lands, leaving only a small percentage available for
private ownership.

Jackson Hole is very finite in terms of real estate. The scarcity of remaining available land and limited land development going into the future, ensures the character and openness of our valley will always remain.

Jackson Hole Airport

Convenient Air Service
The Jackson Hole Airport is situated at the base of the spectacular Teton mountain range. Located entirely
within Grand Teton National Park, flying into the JH Airport is an awe inspiring welcome into the valley.

Jackson Hole is serviced by direct flights to and from Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth, Denver, Salt Lake City, Atlanta and L.A.

Significant Tax Benefits
There are numerous reasons why those who live in Jackson Hole have chosen to have their primary residences here. Some of those reasons are emotional, such as the sheer beauty of the natural surroundings and the overall quality of life. Other reasons are more practical in scope and include Wyoming’s overall tax-climate benefits, when compared to all other states. For years, Bloomberg has rated Wyoming as the most tax-friendly state in the U.S. Here are the 10 top tax benefits offered by Brian Jones, a senior vice president at Bank of Jackson Hole.

1. No state income tax:  With no state tax on personal or corporate income, “you have more disposable income,” Jones says.

2. Dynasty trusts: In Wyoming, you can shield your real estate from federal estate taxes for up to 1,000 years through a dynasty trust. “You can establish a trust in Wyoming for the benefit of your family or other beneficiaries,” Jones says. “You can transfer your real estate into a limited liability company or family partnership and then put that into the ‘dynasty trust,.” As a result, multiple generations can make use of and enjoy the property, without having to pay estate taxes or worse, having to sell the property in order to pay the taxes. A key point to remember: The trust must be administered in Wyoming.

3. No inheritance tax or estate tax: “Wyoming repealed its estate tax as of January 1, 2005,” Jones says.

4. No state gift tax: “Somebody who owns property in Wyoming can ‘gift’ that real estate to their heirs without having to worry about paying a state gift tax,” Jones says.

5. No tax on out-of-state retirement income: “A lot of people in Jackson Hole use Wyoming as a second home,” Jones says. “They have retirement income that comes from other states where they may be a resident. Wyoming doesn’t tax that retirement income that’s earned outside of Wyoming, which is certainly beneficial.”

6. Low property taxes: “Wyoming has very low property taxes compared to other states,” Jones says. “The taxes that you do pay here are based on the assessed value of the property.”

7. No excise taxes:  When you fill up your car’s gas tank or buy groceries in Wyoming, you won’t pay any state tax on your gas or food.

8. No tax on mineral ownership. “A lot of states charge owners a tax on their mineral ownership, but Wyoming does not,” Jones says. “If you own minerals, you won’t pay a tax on it like you would your home.

9. No intangible taxes: Wyoming doesn’t make you pay a tax on financial assets like stocks and bonds.

10. No tax on the sale of real estate.

Wyoming’s Fiscal Responsibility
While many states are wrestling with how to close widening budget deficits, Wyoming lawmakers are determining where to park the state’s surplus. Wyoming is a leading mineral producing  state and gets significant revenue from natural gas, coal and other minerals. The Wyoming state budget surplus is more than $1 billion.

Recently reported by the Denver Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank, the current condition of Wyoming’s economic health and prospects for recovery look promising. Here are a few observations:

• After the contraction of 2009, Wyoming has had significant job growth
• Residential construction in Wyoming one of the leading states in the U.S.
• Population and labor force losses remain minimal
• Retail activity is improving
• Wyoming is well positioned for economic health in 2011

The Arts
Center for the Arts- A 41,000 sq. ft. Arts & Education Pavilion, a 500-seat theatre, Music Center, and theater rehearsal space. The Pavilion offers space for 20 nonprofit organizations creating an atmosphere of collaboration and inspiration.This summer the New York City Ballet is in residence in August in Jackson Hole. Other upcoming events this fall include Johnny Lang and Maceo Parker.

Grand Music Festival – Celebrating their 50th year, Grand Teton Music Festival has inspired countless audiences with world-class concerts by the nation’s finest orchestra players. Led by music director, Donald Runnicles, the summer line up includes a stunning festival orchestra each weekend as well as sought after visiting musicians from around the
globe and delightful chamber music.Center for the Arts – A 41,000 sq. ft. Arts & Education Pavilion, a 500-seat theatre, Music Center, and theater rehearsal space. The Pavilion offers space for 20 nonprofit organizations creating an atmosphere of collaboration and inspiration.

National Museum of Wildlife Art – The museum is unique among American art museums, distinguished by its mission and location. With collections of nearly 4,000 works of art, the museum strives to enrich and inspire public appreciation of fine art and humanity’s relationship with nature. Situated just outside the town of Jackson, the museum overlooks the 20,000-acre National Elk Refuge and is en route to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks.

Jackson Hole Art Galleries – There are about 30 to 40 galleries in Jackson featuring the best of Western art and more recently, newer galleries with a broader focus. The definition of art in the town and the surrounding valley of Jackson Hole has expanded with a popular international film festival, dedicated state-of-the art studios, and organizations such as the Art Association.

National Parks and Forest Lands

Yellowstone National Park
Established in 1872, Yellowstone National Park is America’s first national park. Located ninety miles north of Jackson, it is home to a large variety of wildlife including grizzly bears, wolves, bison, and elk. Preserved within Yellowstone National Park are Old Faithful and a collection of the world’s most extraordinary geysers and hot springs, as well as the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

Grand Teton National Park
On the north end of Jackson Hole, Grand Teton National Park preserves a spectacular landscape rich with majestic mountains, pristine lakes and extraordinary wildlife. In the winter, the park’s main roadway is plowed and open for winter travel from the town of Jackson to Flagg Ranch near Yellowstone National Park’s south boundary. The Craig Thomas Discovery and Visitor Center in Moose is open year-round, except for December 25th.

Bridger-Teton National Forest
Easily accessed by Jackson Hole, Bridger-Teton offers more than 3.4 million acres of public land for outdoor recreation enjoyment. With its pristine watersheds, abundant wildlife and immense wildlands, these forest lands comprise a large part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem – the largest intact ecosystem in the lower 48 States. Offering nearly 1.2 million acres of designated Wilderness, over 30,000 miles of road and trails and thousands of miles of unspoiled rivers and streams, the Bridger-Teton offers something for everyone.

Protecting The Lands we Love
Jackson Hole Land Trust and Nature Conservancy

With 97 percent of Jackson Hole’s land protected as national parks and forests, it’s easy to assume that elk, mule deer, antelope and other key wildlife species have plenty of room to roam between their winter and summer stomping grounds. But Jackson is part of a much bigger, scientifically important region, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and the tiny 3 percent of land here that is privately owned is part of a network of critical migration corridors through the ecosystem.

The Land Trust and The Nature Conservancy are on a mission to protect enough open space for the Yellowstone region’s wildlife to get where they need to go. Through conservation easements and other land-preservation tools, they are working acre by acre to protect important terrain ensuring our valley maintains it visually spectacular character and remains open for wildlife.

 

Jackson/Teton Comprehensive Plan

Defining Our Future Character

Neighborhood Workshops-Bar BC Ranch House/4745 N. Spring Gulch Road, Jackson, Wy 83001 / Friday, Oct 28th 2011 7:00 am-10:am

A week-long series of neighborhood workshops

will be held in various locations throughout the

community. These community events are a

chance for us to come together and discuss the

future for our neighborhoods and how to meet

the vision of our new Comprehensive Plan.

 

 

October 27, 28, 29, 31 & November 1

 

Neighborhood Workshops Schedule

 

Date Time Location

 

October 27

 

11 am – 2 pm Nick Wilson’s, 3265 W. Village Drive

 

(clock tower building, Teton Village)

 

5 – 8 pm Jackson Senior Center, 830 E. Hansen Avenue

 

6 – 8 pm Alta Library, 50 Alta School Road

 

October 28

 

7 – 10 am Bar BC Ranch House , 4745 N. Spring Gulch Road

 

5 – 8 pm Cafe Boheme, 1110 Maple Way

 

October 29

 

10 am – 1 pm Rafter J Childcare Center, 3105 W. Big Trail Drive

 

2 – 5 pm Old Wilson Schoolhouse, 5655 W. Main Street

 

October 31

3 – 6 pm Teton Pines Clubhouse, 3450 Clubhouse Drive

November 1

12 – 2 pm Snow King Grand Ballroom, 400 E. Snow King Avenue

Hansen dies on ranch

 

 

 

By Johanna Love, Jackson Hole, Wyoming

September 30, 2011

Former First Lady of Wyoming, homemaker and ranch matron Martha Close Hansen died early Thursday morning at home in Spring Gulch. She was 97.

She passed five days after what would have been her 77th wedding anniversary with Clifford P. Hansen. The former Wyoming governor and U.S. Senator preceded her in death on Oct. 20, 2009.

Friends remembered her as gracious and sweet, always taking care of others. 

Born June 5, 1914, in Lewiston, Mont., Hansen grew up in Sheridan and attended University of Wyoming, where she met her future husband. After a small ceremony, they moved to Jackson to the ranch where Cliff had grown up. They had two children, Mary and Peter.

On the Hansen ranch, Martha made sure her family and a varying number of ranch hands were well fed, especially when there were huge haying crews. She was an excellent cook by all accounts.

In October 1954, she hosted the gathering of 14 ranch women who began the Jackson Hole Cow Belles. Their mission was to promote beef consumption.

Sometime during that era, she rode horseback for the filming of a motion picture because the lead actress was afraid of horses.

“Grandma looked like a young Ingrid Bergman,” said grandson Brad Mead of the home movies he watched of the film being made.

In general, she was happy to let Cliff have the spotlight. When he got into politics, first as a school board member, then as county commissioner, governor and U.S. senator, Martha was at his side. As the state’s first lady, in 1965 she compiled “Cooking in Wyoming,” a book including recipes and history of the Equality State. She gave tours of the Capitol to Cliff’s constituents who visited from Washington, D.C. and contributed her much-lauded recipe of beef tenderloin with blue cheese to an edition of “The Congressional Club Cookbook.”

Hansen was a quintessential homemaker and loyal wife, said Diana Brown, whose husband’s family ranched nearby.

“She supported him in everything,” Brown said. “I don’t think they ever said a cross word to one another.”

Many folks around town recall seeing Cliff and Martha holding hands, everywhere they went. Margie Thomas said the couple would hold hands to walk in for lunch at the Senior Center of Jackson Hole.

“I said, ‘Couple of lovebirds,’ ” Thomas said. “Martha said, ‘We’re just holding each other up.’ ”

Upon news of her death, condolences have flooded in from politicians, acquaintances and friends. U.S. Representative Cynthia Lummis called Martha and Cliff “the ultimate Wyoming couple.” U.S. Senator John Barrasso said he and his wife, Bobbi, “will always remember her generous heart and selfless spirit.”

Services have not yet been set. In lieu of flowers, the Mead/Hansen family asks that donations be made to Hospice of the Tetons.