Grand Targhee and the Powder
Near Driggs, Wyoming
High on the western shoulder of the Teton Range, reached by the winding road up from Driggs, sits Grand Targhee, one of the great powder mountains of North America. Although skiers get there through Idaho, the resort itself lies just over the line in Alta, Wyoming, in the Caribou Targhee National Forest. A group of eastern Idaho investors formed the company in the mid nineteen sixties, and the lifts first turned on the day after Christmas in nineteen sixty nine.
What makes Targhee famous is the snow. The resort averages more than five hundred inches a season, and it falls almost always as dry powder. That is a matter of geography.
Storms ride a moisture channel up the Snake River Plain from the Pacific, then rise and cool against the wet western slope of the Tetons, dumping their snow here before crossing to the drier Jackson Hole side. For decades Targhee was the locals' secret, an unpretentious powder hideout in the shadow of the Grand. Today it anchors much of Teton Valley's winter economy, and proposed expansions of the resort are among the biggest questions facing the towns below.
