The skiing holiday that thinks it's a safari
Be grateful for David Attenborough and his breed. Thanks to them, we know it’s hard work to go on safari. All those dawn starts; having your bottom spanked on game drives by the seat of an ancient four-wheel drive; searching in the bush for animal poop; and the slow lowering of the guide’s binoculars, signalling that nothing is moving out there. Only the patient traveller should go to Africa. For the rest of us, safaris are best experienced on the TV, with the boring bits edited out, or in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Why Wyoming? Because you don’t track down the wildlife there: it comes to Jackson Hole in winter as readily as skiers do. Obviously giraffes and rhinoceroses don’t make the trip, but there’s certainly a Big Two – bison and moose – more elk than you can see in a single location anywhere else in the world, plus prairie dogs and mountain lions.
Skiers visit Jackson for its spectacular setting – mountains crowding around the “hole”, as trappers named the depression – and for ski slopes that are among North America’s most demanding. What attracts the animals is food. The elk, many thousands of them every winter, are fed in the National Elk Refuge; and, in turn, predators such as eagles and wolves feed on the elk.
The big ruminants have the mountains west of Jackson, the Tetons, to thank for much of their food supply: weather systems heading east shed their moisture over the mountains, leaving the grazing for bison and elk relatively clear of snow. And the Snake River, winding around the foothills, provides drinking water.
Much of the land here is managed primarily for the benefit of fauna and flora. The Bridger-Teton National Forest virtually encircles Jackson Hole; the Grand Teton National Park is a protective swathe running about 30 miles to the north. The latter doesn’t quite reach up to Yellowstone National Park, but the John D Rockefeller Jr Memorial Parkway – an 11-mile (18km) “green alleyway” established in 1972 – gives wildlife safe passage into the park; and Yellowstone admits few humans during the winter months. And there’s added value for the bison coming into the park from Idaho’s freezing plains: they can have a steaming hot bath in Yellowstone’s geysers.
Fly into Jackson in the late afternoon – when many long-haul passengers land – and you get a wonderful view of the dramatic Tetons. These are mountains that shoot directly from the ground, with an unmannerly lack of foothills.
Just a little way along the two-lane road from the airport into town, the Teton Village lift base comes into view: it has a cluster of hotels including a Four Seasons property. Adjacent to the village is a substantial development of grand, lodge-style houses, many available for rent; but across the road is where the real real estate lies. Mostly brightly lit at dusk but often tantalisingly shrouded by trees, these are the multimillion-dollar, architect-designed properties of the very rich, dwellings that – as one realtor (estate agent) told me – are regularly visited by housekeepers and on occasion by the owners.
In contrast, Jackson itself looks like a typical small western town, its grid of narrow streets lined with buildings mostly just two storeys high. But its shabby veneer cannot hide some incongruities, the most obvious being a multistorey greenhouse attached to a car park at the centre of town. This, called Vertical Harvest, is a moving, heaven-and-earth project which grows as much produce as a 10-acre farm and provides employment for local people with learning difficulties. Another oddity is the parade of shops, which wouldn’t be out of place in Bond Street. And, perhaps most surprising for small-town Wyoming, there’s a boutique property called Hotel Jackson, created by an ebullient Lebanese entrepreneur, a local who made part of his fortune from Swarovski shops.
The curious melange to be found in Jackson – and in Teton County, of which it is the county seat – is a product of its extremely mixed community, which ranges from the extravagantly rich to ski bums and lifties (though many of the latter actually commute from nearby Idaho, where rents are lower).
In some ski resorts, notably among the long-established Swiss destinations, the affluence can be oppressive. Jackson Hole has none of that. Steep slopes are great levellers, so to speak: even the finest skiwear looks bad when it’s lying on the resort’s signature descent, Corbet’s Couloir. This is a pitch that lives up to its reputation, demanding guts and skill – in that order. The entry is a narrow chute, so you must put in a turn as soon as you hit the snow. What follows is either (a) a sequence of fast zigzags until the chute widens or (b) a cartwheeling mess of snow, limbs and skis. The chances of (a) are somewhat improved when snow is plentiful.
I know all this through observing skiers jump into Corbet’s, from the popular viewpoints above the descent. Regrettably, there has never been quite enough snow for me to tackle Corbet’s; and I don’t expect the situation to change any time soon. But that still leaves a mountain-full of black runs below the 3,185m Rendezvous peak plus more than 3,000 acres of backcountry terrain. On this, the southern part of the ski area, three traverses are the only runs not rated as blacks.
A decade ago, most of this ski terrain was already in place. But at that time the intermediate slopes on the northern part of the ski area, called Après Vous, were limited in number and lacking in variety. Soon afterwards, however, the resort hired a marketing man named Chip Carey. For his determination to increase the resort’s appeal to family skiers – notably by improving the blue runs, which are now much more varied in pitch and profile – he acquired the nickname “Blue Chip”.
He has since moved on, but what Blue Chip started continues: for the 2018-19 season, the resort has a new learning centre, Solitude Station. Because of their day care needs, children under the age of seven continue to use an existing facility at the busy lift base; but older kids and adults can escape the congestion by riding for two minutes on a lift that opens at 8am and has a dedicated entry point for Solitude Station. Inside the facility are areas for children and adults, offering equipment rental and ski-school bookings; outside, the nursery slope has a covered conveyor lift.
The bison appears to be a ponderous beast; by comparison, the cow seems hyperactive. While feeding, a bison slowly moves its head from side to side, rather as if it has lost a contact lens; at other times, signs of life are limited to steam gently rising from its head, and the fact that the animal hasn’t actually keeled over. Evidently they do go from place to place, but only slowly, and not when I’m looking.
The first time I got close to one, I took these signs to indicate a placid temperament. I didn’t tickle it under the chin, but it was close. Maybe the safari guide that day was a bison whisperer; certainly he saw no reason not to drive his truck along one side of a fence, stop with one of the beasts on the other side, and drop his truck’s windows.
For this trip I did some research. Though male bison weigh up to 2,000lb (900kg), they can jump a 6ft (1.8m) fence from a standstill and gallop at up to 34mph; they account for most animal attacks in the Teton County area. I still like bison, mainly for their huge chests, which almost scrape the ground; but now I like to keep a pair of binoculars between myself and the animal.
On the back roads around Jackson in winter you see a lot of people with binoculars, or a sight mounted on a tripod; and after the reported sighting of a mountain lion, they grab a flask of coffee, a folding chair and a big SUV in which to safari from one ad hoc car park to another, swapping information and fake news. My safari last season came courtesy of the tour operator Ski Safari; its holidays are usually purely multi-ski-resort itineraries, but in Jackson it combines what Attenborough would recognise as a safari with a ski holiday.
From the wildlife tours available in Jackson, I chose one to Yellowstone and another covering the Grand Teton National Park. On the latter, a gratifying range of animals came to see the humans close-up: plenty of bison, two magnificent, inquisitive moose, and about 4,000 elk – but sadly not the mountain lion. The round trip to Yellowstone – 260 miles (420km) and 11 hours long – was fairly gruelling, and the game was limited; but the empty landscape (only guided day-visits are permitted in winter) was awesome, and the geysers made a great show of Mother Nature’s weird side. Yes, Old Faithful does explode to a tight schedule, so the visitor centre can always display the time of the next show; but my favourite among the 10,000 geysers is the newest, the angry Red Spouter. Created by an earthquake in 1959, it is a non-stop, frenetic pool of terra cotta mud with – at a guess – a chainsaw at the bottom.
Need to know
Ski Safari offers a seven-night B&B stay at the three-star Parkway Inn, including direct return flights from London Heathrow with Delta Air Lines, shared transfers and daily breakfasts, from £1,425 per person. Prices based on two people sharing a king room and departing in March 2019. Additional costs include: four-day lift pass from £250 per person; Yellowstone National Park Old Faithful snow coach tour from £200 per person; Best of Jackson Hole wildlife safari from £200 per person.
