Listen in Sam's voice (generated with ElevenLabs)
Hey kids, it's Dad. Today's story is a special one, because it's about a place our family actually knows really well and spends a lot of time in — Jackson Hole, Wyoming. This is the story of how a quiet valley surrounded by jagged mountains became one of the most famous, most extreme ski destinations on Earth.
First, let's talk about the name, because it's a little strange. 'Jackson Hole' isn't a hole in the ground — old-time fur trappers in the early 1800s called any high mountain valley ringed by peaks a 'hole,' because from a distance it looked like a bowl carved into the mountains. This particular valley got named after a trapper named Davey Jackson, who used to spend winters there trapping beaver back in the 1820s. So really, 'Jackson's Hole' just meant 'Jackson's valley,' and the name stuck for two hundred years.
Long before any trappers showed up, though, the valley belonged to Native American tribes, especially the Shoshone, who moved through it in the warmer months to hunt, since the winters there are brutally cold and the snow piles up unbelievably deep. That deep, dry, fluffy snow — sitting right at the base of the jagged Teton mountain range — is exactly why this place would later become a skiing paradise.
For a long time, though, nobody thought of that snow as fun — it was just an obstacle. Ranchers and cowboys who settled the valley in the early 1900s used skis the way you'd use snowshoes: strictly to get around in winter, checking on cattle or hauling mail over deep drifts, not for recreation. It wasn't until the late 1930s that people in Jackson started strapping on skis just for the thrill of sliding downhill.
In 1939, locals built one of the first real ski areas in the whole country right in town, on a small mountain called Snow King, using a rope tow — basically a moving rope you'd grab onto that dragged you up the hill so you didn't have to hike back up every run. Snow King is still there today, and it's nicknamed 'the town hill,' because generations of local kids have learned to ski on it, including plenty of kids we know.
But the real turning point came in 1965, when a rancher and businessman named Paul McCollister looked up at Rendezvous Mountain — a massive peak just south of town — and decided to build something enormous there. In 1966, his new resort, Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, opened an aerial tram that carried skiers over four thousand vertical feet straight up the mountain, one of the biggest vertical drops of any ski resort in North America. Skiers nicknamed that original tram car 'Big Red,' and it hauled people up that mountain for forty years before finally being retired in 2006 and replaced with a new tram in 2008.
That huge vertical drop, combined with steep chutes, cliffs, and deep snow, made Jackson Hole famous for something specific: extreme, expert-level skiing, not gentle groomed cruising runs. The single most famous run of all is a narrow, terrifying chute called Corbet's Couloir, named after a local ski patroller, Barry Corbet, who was one of the first people ever brave enough to ski down it. To even get into Corbet's, you have to jump off a rocky ledge and drop ten to twenty feet through the air before your skis even touch snow — it's still considered one of the scariest in-bounds ski runs in the world, and skiers travel from everywhere just to try it, or just to watch other people try it.
By the 1990s, Jackson Hole's reputation for gnarly, big-mountain terrain made it a favorite home for extreme skiing competitions, where the best skiers in the world would ski down cliffs and couloirs that looked almost impossible, judged on how fast and how stylishly they could get down alive. That reputation as the wild, expert mountain — as opposed to a fancier, groomed resort — is still exactly what Jackson Hole is known for today.
What I love about this story is that it connects two very different kinds of toughness — the tough fur trappers and ranchers who first survived those valleys two hundred years ago just to get by, and the tough skiers today who ski the same mountains purely for fun and adventure. Same brutal snow, same jagged peaks, completely different reason for being there.
So next time we're driving into the valley, past the antler arches in the town square, and looking up at the Tetons, remember: that's Davey Jackson's old trapping valley, that's the mountain where a rope tow started it all in 1939, and that's the tram that's been hauling skiers up four thousand vertical feet since 1966. That's the story of the history of skiing in Jackson Hole. See you next time on the Lessin Boy Podcast.