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Max Ludington stands in a patch of aspen near grazing cattle and a small corral on a 640-acre parcel of state trust land south of town, nestled between the Snake River Range and the Snake River itself. He leads the Jackson Hole Land Trust and said that less than a year ago.
Houndstongue and thistle burs and seedlings would catch a biker’s sock, a hiker’s pant cuff or an ungulate’s leg.
“It would have been filled with weeds, with thistle and houndstongue and other invasive weeds,” he said.
Last summer, state land commissioners agreed to lease the square mile south of town to the county, which is getting help from the Land Trust, Friends of Pathways and Friends of Munger Mountain. In 2022, Teton County voters passed a special tax that’s helping fund the lease.
The lease is for $75,000 a year, which will amount to about $2.6 million by the time the recreation lease ends. The state distributes the money to public schools and it’s a lot more than it was getting from just a grazing lease with neighboring Snake River Ranch.
“The goal of that lease is to balance improving recreation with the existing cattle grazing on this parcel,” Ludington said, “as well as upholding and hopefully improving the conservation values.”
The work will also spruce up the trail system, honor a longstanding grazing lease and promote native forage for migrating wildlife like elk.
The first step: spraying for invasive weeds that, if left untreated, would spread and outcompete native forage that wildlife and cattle depend on.
Katherine Dowson recently pushed her bike up loose rock on one section. She leads Friends of Pathways, which plans to improve the trail — along with others — over the next several years.
Instead of a proposal for a glamping resort on the public land, she says the new lease between the county and state is a win-win.
“We knew that we needed money for the state to have a decent lease, and not just a couple thousand dollars a year,” Dowson said.
Within a few years, the nonprofits’ conservation and trail work should result in more creek crossings and trail connectors to nearby forest service trails while maintaining a longstanding grazing lease.
That, of course, after the unglamorous work of spraying invasive weeds.
