- No part of the big National Park Service has a more unique origin story or developmental history than Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

That story keeps getting more interesting all the time as 200 new acres have now been added to the park as of 2026.

It took more than 25 years to get it done, and a key conservationist and the superintendent of the park itself are here to tell us what happened.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is Wyoming.

Dan Schleger of the Conservation Fund, Chip Jenkins, superintendent of Grand Teton National Park, and that's where we are.

In fact, we're in a new, brand new portion of Grand Teton National Park.

Dan, tell us how that came to be.

- Well, it's been a 25-year effort to add six parcels to Grand Teton National Park, one by one.

The first two happened in 2000 and 2001, and it was 17 years before the next one could get acquired by the park, and then three more in succession after that.

- So when you say parcels, we're talking about land that had been private land within the park itself, which is one of the oddities of Grand Teton.

Maybe it's not exclusive to Grand Teton, but it is not necessarily what people would think of when they think of a national park.

Mr.

Superintendent, how come there's private land inside this national park?

- Well, that's actually, it's in the DNA actually of Grand Teton National Park.

It was a hundred years ago this year in 1926 that John D. Rockefeller started the Snake River Land Company to be able to start buying private property in Jackson Hole.

Community leaders at that time, as well as Mr.

Rockefeller, were concerned about tawdry development.

- Tawdry.

- Messing up the scenic values and inhibiting the tourism economy here, and started a hundred years ago on buying land here for conservation and preservation.

- What I think the implication of what you said is a lot of people sold, but not everybody did.

And that's why there still were little pockets of private land within the park.

- Ultimately, they acquired a little over 33,000 acres that were donated to the American people to create Grand Teton National Park.

He also bought 25,000 acres from private citizens that were donated to the American people from the National Elk Refuge.

And I think while we know the Rockefeller name, I think we also owe a debt of gratitude to those hundreds of families, those thousands of family members that made the decision to be able to sell.

- They didn't have to.

- They did not have to.

- But they did, and we're talking off camera.

They had different reasons perhaps for wanting to do it, deciding to do it.

But in fact, they did.

The park itself existed in a smaller footprint and now has become the much larger one and now larger still.

The land that you're talking about that has been secured, that's now been protected, it's now part of the park itself.

When Conservation Fund got done with its work in cooperation with the park and with the Park Service and other entities, I'm sure, it's not just a buffer zone around the park.

This now is Grand Teton National Park.

It got bigger.

- The family here, the Snake River Ranch families, they had a conservation ethic.

They do have a conservation ethic.

And it took an extraordinarily long time for them holding this private land for these series of acquisitions to work out for their family and to work out for the park.

And so it's yet like the families of old, there's a lot of things that need to come together for that to happen.

And as land values continue to just escalate in this valley, it's a huge decision for them.

- How come something like this takes so long?

And I think you've began to touch on that.

Wondering if you've got different generations, for example, I might want more money than grandma did or vice versa.

And they're all perfectly legitimate reasons to step through it as carefully as we can.

- I think that answer begins with it's almost a two word answer.

It's land.

- It's land.

- And people feel very passionate about land.

It's been in the family for a long time.

There's the family goals and those families in this example, and this occurs with all land transactions, there are dozens upon dozens of family members.

And so having all of them align on one side and then the park on the other side of that transaction and the way the conservation fund works, it's very often when a family wishes to sell or land, it's like a small little gear.

And once they make that decision, they want to sell.

The park in this case or whatever partners that the conservation fund is working with, that's a big year that moves really slowly.

And what the conservation fund does is we can move quickly to buy land much more quickly than the federal government can, but then align the circumstances so that that land can become part of like Grand Teton National Park.

And then there's just many steps in between on that side between congressional appropriations and collaboration with the local community and all the legal issues that arise and land issues to enable a stepping, which is why something like this takes as long as it does.

- Many different things have to line up, not the least of which is the federal funds to be able to acquire these lands.

While the Park Service has been working on this for over 21 years to be able to do this acquisition, really one of the major things that changed was about seven years ago with the passage of the Great American Outdoors Act under the first Trump administration where they fully funded what's called the Landed Water Conservation Fund.

And at that point, funding became available for us to be able to move this along.

And that's why in the last six years, we've been able to move to acquire four of the six parcels, really remarkable set of circumstances coming together at one point.

It was the private property owners, the family of the Snake River Ranch, they were committed to conservation.

While they were interested in selling the property, what they were interested in doing is making sure that the properties, that these parcels, their land, they wanted a legacy of having their land become part of Grand Teton National Park for all Americans.

- What did we get here exactly?

We're standing on it now.

I think in the shot we're in, people can look and see.

There's some of the peaks of the Teton Range, beautiful country around us.

What's the property like?

- Just behind us, it's the Granite Canyon entrance station to the park.

And so you pass Teton Village and it's like the deep breath before the plunge into the park where there's a lot of development at the village and this is the scenic entrance.

And rather than seeing a lot of development here or luxury homes, which could have happened, you're entering the park and part of it is the scenery, part of it is the wildlife habitat, which is very rich in this area.

And part of it is the recreation.

There's recreation trails, the Granite Canyon Trailhead, the Valley Trail, all right here.

- Well, that's an interesting point you make as you drive out from the town of Jackson as we did.

You come through, there's the town, there's the Teton Village, which I think most viewers understand is the development, much of it, very luxurious, related to one of the great ski resorts in the whole world.

And then you come farther out and there's some cattle grazing and then you come a little farther out and we're getting into this empty territory.

And not far from here is one of the park entrances.

So it is this beautiful transition and you didn't really want, well, here's the end of the golf course or the end of the hotel parking lot, boom, National Park.

You've been involved in other transactions through the years.

One of the more famous ones is this one that got a lot of attention the past couple years called the Kelly Parcel.

And this is kind of similar to that, sort of a similar objective.

What are some differences between the two because it got so many more headlines than this did.

- Kelly, it really has to do with the landowners.

In that case, it was the state of Wyoming that owned the land.

In this case, it was private landowners.

And so when the state decides to sell an asset that's that valuable and the federal government is buying that, that's big news.

And so - - There'd be private investors who get interested as well.

- Oh yeah.

- Correct.

For sure.

For sure.

In this case, it could have been expansion of the ski resort.

And so in both, they're really highly threatening to the park's natural resources.

And on both we work together and on the Kelly parcel we had the amazing partnership with the Grand Teton National Park Foundation as well.

- You made a good point as we were getting acquainted earlier, comparing it to Yellowstone right next door to us here.

And I think the term you used was draw a border around this and declare it a national park, which is I think what people might think of sort of the classic way of doing a national park.

They aren't all the same.

And the national park service, of course, is much more than just the national park.

- Your national park system consists of 433 units of the national park system.

- And - We are some of the iconic landscapes in the country, obviously Grand Teton National Park, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon.

But there are also some of the other icons of America.

The Lincoln Memorial, the White House is literally a unit in the National Park.

We have places like the Statue of Liberty and Gettysburg, Women's Right, Martin Luther King Birthplace.

So we are this, there was a noted historian from Harvard, Robert Winks, who talked about how the National Park System is like a quilt with every panel of quilt being a unit and that quilt being the heritage of - The - Common heritage of - Our - Country.

- I'm not trying to quiz you on this.

You probably get it right anyway.

In Wyoming, I think the typical person would say, "Well, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, that's the National Park Service."

But I think, was it seven National Park units in the state?

Devil's Tower's one, correct?

- Devil's Tower, Fort Laramie, Fossil Buttes.

But what we also have is the California Trail, that Oregon Trail, the Pony Express Trail are also units of the National Park Service.

- Were there specific concerns, and I'm deliberately being very careful, not to cast any aspersions on private landowners who had the right to do what they wanted with their property.

- Absolutely.

- Were there specific concerns that you had about these parcels?

- One of the big concerns is simply time.

The Snaper Ranch families were interested in this for even longer than when the Conservation Fund got involved and helped them do the first one 25 years ago.

It's probably a 40-year vision.

And so if you imagine someone having that vision, I don't know how old they were at the time in their 20s or 30s, that generation, some of that first generation has passed away and there are kids and grandkids and multiple generations.

And as each one passes, gets older and the land values go up, it becomes harder and harder to do this.

The fact that the family remain committed to this through all of that is really extraordinary.

- Wyomingites and the American people, we owe a great debt of gratitude to many, many private property owners throughout Wyoming, throughout the greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

The reason that grizzly bears have recovered, the reason that we have thriving elk and pronghorn herds, the reason that we have these iconic animals that are able to live on the landscape, it's because they are able to move around on the landscape, that they are able to have winter habitat, summer habitat, night habitat, day habitat.

- That bison doesn't look down on the ground and see the dotted line where the park ends.

- That is exactly right.

And here, Grand Teton and Jackson Hole is a really, really tough place to be in the winter, whether you're a person or an elk.

And different wildlife have different strategies for responding to that, to their habitat needs.

Bears hibernate, elk, deer, pronghorn, they go somewhere else.

They migrate someplace else.

And while they migrate across national parkland, they migrate across national forest lands - - State boundaries.

- State boundaries too, right.

They go over the Teton range into Idaho.

And these animals go from here up to the south fork of the Shoshone outside of Cody.

They go over the Grovance and Wind Rivers to near Riverton and Dubois by the Wind River Reservation, and they go south down by Pinedale.

And in many, many places they are traveling across private property or they are wintering on private property.

And the fact that we have generations of families who have managed their lands in a way for working lands, for agricultural purposes, and that they have also supported wildlife, that means that we in Wyoming and the American people benefit from those choices, but people may not make those choices forever into the future.

- Grand Teton National Park is how many acres roughly?

- About 330,000.

- Thousand.

Yellowstone, one of the great - - 2.3 million.

- One of the big, big parks.

But this area around that you've been talking about, which I think maybe, I don't know how long ago, 50 years ago, maybe the term greater Yellowstone ecosystem was coin talking about some public land, some of the private land you've been mentioning as well, that is in a much, much larger area of how many acres?

- The greater Yellowstone ecosystem is about 23 million acres.

And out of that 23 million, about seven million is in private property.

About 15 million is in a variety of different public ownership.

- And so while the national parks have their much more strict kind of controls and protections and rules, so to speak, the objectives that you've got for these larger areas are similar and absolutely vital.

- We are very interested in making sure that there is a thriving sustainable ecosystem.

And when we say a thriving sustainable ecosystem, that means that we mean by that, that we have a thriving elk population and we have good paying jobs for people to be able to live here, that we have trumpeter swans, and we have housing for school teachers and medical providers and snowplow drivers.

We want to be able to have places where people can come and seek inspiration from whether they are hunting or taking photographs or visiting with their family, and that there are also civic institutions that make for a thriving community.

- That's the ultimate act of pragmatism, really.

- We - Understand what's required and also understand what - We - Wish for, what we want.

No other national park, I believe, at least in terms of sort of the big natural wonder style national park, is that coexistence greater than Grand Teton, which down the road here has a big airport in it, which here's my little Wyoming trivia.

Wyoming has, I think, nine commercial airports, including one where we come from, including the biggest cities in Wyoming, bigger than Jackson, Cheyenne, Casper, Gillette, Laramie, Riverton's bigger than Jackson, Rock Springs.

All those airports together times two don't board half as many as Jackson Airport does in the middle of a national park.

It's just kind of semi-wild thing.

An interesting park to be the superintendent of, I take it.

- It is.

Grand Teton is both its origin story in terms of, and how it exists today is a really, really interesting experiment in terms of ongoing coexistence.

And that's what I want to say is that Grand Teton, the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, it is an ongoing experiment of how we have a functioning ecosystem where people and wildlife and clean water can all thrive.

One of the aspects of that is I am the landlord for the Jackson Hole Airport, and we have a very close collaborative working relationship with the airport.

- Wyman Chronicle viewers might recall a couple of years ago, we did a Wyman Chronicle segment installment about the renovations at the airport.

And the director there made a point of saying, and we had a couple people on camera.

Yeah, this is a big airport.

It's bigger than... There are major metropolitan airports in the nation, smaller than this in terms of passengers, but it is a big airport in a national park and that's how we looked at it from the very beginning.

And some of the extraordinary measures that were taken, it made it take longer, it was more expensive, it was more complicated, but that we had to do and that they wanted to do to prove that it could be done in terms of getting this project done so that the big airport, again, semi-crazy sort of idea to think about could continue to exist in the way that worked for everybody.

- I think the airport board has a great deal of pride, deservedly so in terms of while they're operating an airport, they're also trying to be really, really good stewards.

And so they're pursuing things like having eliminated PFASs and they're the first night sky certified airport in the world.

So yeah, it's an interesting partnership.

We also have Jackson Lake Dam, which is operated by the Bureau of Reclamation.

The 93% of the water behind the dam is actually owned by irrigators in Idaho.

And so while the Snake River is the lifeblood of Jackson Hole, the water that flows through there is on its way to be able to support agriculture in part so that we have food to eat to be here.

- Yeah.

So the same river that we're having fun floating down, saying Yahoo is also irrigating a field.

- Yeah.

- Add that in that ecosystem, we're still learning things recently, especially in the timescale of the ecosystem.

And one of those things is we knew wildlife migrated mule deer and pronghorn, but we didn't know how specific they were to the areas, like the exact routes.

And so one of the things the Conservation Fund has done a lot of is tens of thousands of acres of migration root protection through, for example, the upper Green River Valley, where the only federally designated migration root in the country is that's the path of Pronghorn, and also the longest, which is the sublet mule deer migration.

And through the recent science in the last 15 years or so of the Wyoming Migration Initiative, all of those mule deer migrate between the town of Pinedale and Fremont Lake, and that was for sale.

And you imagine like lakefront, near town, we went and purchased that property and that's now a Wyoming Game and Fish management area, habitat management area.

So it's like keeping those, and those are the wildlife that we see here.

- That's the thing.

And that work in terms of the private property owners down there by Fremont Lake, the work by Wyoming Game and Fish, the work by the Conservation Fund, taking that conservation action that seems to be so far away, 75 miles away, is actually directly benefiting the people who like to come here in Grand Teton to be able to enjoy those wildlife.

- As you said, we knew the deer, we knew the pronghorn walked along here.

For a long time the assumption is, well, they'll just find another way to do it.

They literally, this is true scientific instinct.

They don't know how to do anything but what they've always done.

It's good to hear you see you both talking about this bigger picture thing because the park ends somewhere and the private property and the public property ends somewhere.

And so you're constantly keeping your arms out and trying to embrace as much as you can.

- Right.

And we're not suggesting that the park boundary should get bigger.

But what we recognize is that the park is deeply intertwined with the local community, deeply intertwined with the working landscapes here.

- Speaking of that, Dan, you wanted to talk about another member of the Rockefeller family that was involved in a similar sort of effort with some ranch property of a different name that also has been key to what's happened here overall.

- Yeah.

It's just a really interesting continuation of the Rockefeller story.

And when they transferred all the land to the park, they maintained their family.

It was a dude ranch originally, the JY Ranch, which is on Phelps Lake, which is just a few miles up the road here.

And then ultimately they decided to add that to the park.

And that was the first work the Conservation Fund did in Wyoming in helping that whole process along.

And over a period of years, it eventually became the Lawrence Rockefeller Preserve.

And that's just a place that it's another extraordinary little part that's different in Grand Teton.

And the visitor center there is oriented around the five senses, really quiet.

In my case, and this was just one of our dozens of amazing family memories in Grand Teton, my son has hearing loss and so his cochlear implant helps him here.

And he was little, maybe two or three years old, and we didn't know whether it work or not.

And went into the sound room.

There's a circular sound room with all sounds of the park, so elk bugling and wolves howling and owls and aspen leaves rustling.

And he stopped in the middle and his eyes were kind of wide.

And I said, "What do you hear?"

And he didn't really say anything from it.

And then he said, "I hear everything."

- Everything.

- And that for us was just, I start to cheer up thinking about it even today, 20 years later, he's 23 now.

And so we - - Great moment.

- Yeah.

I think that what's really important about parks is we're planting seeds both in ourselves and the next generation.

And if you look around all these trees like that, in that seed is the potential to be that tree, but you need to water it and nourish it.

And when people come to a place like this and they come three million a year or more, that may awaken in them their own potential in seeing what an amazing, inspiring, wonderful place this is.

- We've shot a couple of Wyoming Chronicle shows over in Yellowstone.

Crowding has become a real issue there.

How are we doing in Grand Teton in terms of managing the millions of people who want to come and see it?

- What I would encourage people to think about is visitation is not like a thermometer where the number goes up or down.

Visitation is more like a balloon because visitation occupies space on the land differently.

And let me give the example is that in the last 10 years, visitation has gone up 20%.

In the last 10 years through 25, our trail use has gone up 40%.

So people are behaving differently on the landscape.

What's really interesting is this year we're seeing a very, very distinct shift in visitation patterns.

On six of our major trails, we have seen a 30% increase in trail use over last year where visitation is about flat, but we've seen a 30% increase year over year in folks on trails.

And we're trying to understand what's going on and why that's happening.

We have seen now about 20, 25% of the people visiting the park this year are using AI tools to plan their itinerary.

What we are also seeing is that people are, folks who are under 30 are using primarily TikTok to plan their itinerary.

So the combination of AI tools and TikTok seems to be reinforcing people going to some of the most popular places like Jenny Lake.

Visitation in Grand Teton is very different than Yellowstone.

I think most people will notice, you know, if you, when you drive in, often what people are doing is they are driving to a destination.

They're going to a place like the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone or Old Faithful.

Here in Grand Teton, you can be standing on the top of Snow King Mountain and enjoying Grand Teton.

You can be at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort.

You can be over on the Bridger Teton National Forest and enjoying Grand Teton.

The landscape is so open that... And part of what we see is that our visitation pattern is there is no visitation pattern.

- Chip Jenkins, you've been superintendent here how long?This - Is my sixth summer.

- Sixth summer.

Where did you come from?

What was your previous posting?

- I was previously at Mount Rainier National Park where I was superintendent.

Before that I was the acting superintendent in Yosemite National Park.

Wow.

- So you've seen some of the biggies, pretty good mountain scapes there too.

- I have been very, very blessed with my career.

- What do you think of Wyoming Grand Teton?

I'm not asking you to rank them, but we hold our own against Yosemite and Mount Rainier, don't we?

- There is not a better place to be in the National Park Service than in Grand Teton National Park.