Four Agencies: Drop Targhee's South Bowl

VICTOR — Four of the five cooperating agencies on the Grand Targhee expansion asked the Forest Service on Thursday to take South Bowl out of the project. More than two dozen objectors followed, and most asked for the same thing.

South Bowl is undeveloped ground in Teton Canyon outside the resort's current permit boundary, reached on foot from the resort's gates, and it carries the winter range of the Teton Range bighorn herd. The expansion would bring it inside the boundary and run a lift into it.

The Sept. 24 meeting was at the Wildwood Room in Victor, and the only gathering the Caribou-Targhee National Forest noticed in the objection process for its 694-acre expansion approval. Facilitator Kari Anderson set the terms before anyone spoke. Objectors would name actions they wanted the Forest Service to take, within the agency's authority. "This meeting is not a restatement of objections."

Cooperating agency resolutions

Chris Colligan of Teton County, Wyoming opened for the five. "Each of these agencies reviewed the final EIS and the record of decision through its own responsibilities," he said. "For most of us, it was the first time we've ever filed an objection. ... Something about this process missed the mark for cooperating agencies."

Teton County, Idaho Commission Chairman Brad Wolfe built his remedies around the construction implementation plan, which the Forest Service must authorize before work proceeds. He asked that each season's approval be conditioned on "clear, enforceable benchmarks that protect our shared watershed, our infrastructure, and local residents."

"The road access, emergency dispatch, solid waste processing, and workforce housing for Grand Targhee flow through Teton County, Idaho," Wolfe said. "Yet none of the resort's property, sales or lodging tax revenues accrue to our county." Doubling resort visitation, he said, "will accelerate Teton County's road reconstruction cycle on Ski Hill Road, East 2500 North, and East 2000 South from 10 years down to seven, adding $187,000 in annual maintenance alongside $12 million in one-time costs." In 2025, Teton County 911 "handled 281 emergency calls originating from Wyoming, the majority from Grand Targhee Resort."

Driggs Mayor August Christensen narrowed the city's objection to two items, South Bowl and the restaurant proposed for the summit of Fred's Mountain. The city "finds the justification for a mountaintop restaurant on Fred's Mountain to be inadequate," she told reviewing officer Kristin Bail. "The 150,000 square feet of approved private base area development just 10 minutes from ... the top of Fred's Mountain, in addition to the Sacajawea on-mountain restaurant, are more than adequate to serve the dining needs of resort guests."

Habitat protection biologist Ross Crandall said Wyoming Game and Fish had looked for "mitigation options that would effectively reduce the impacts" of an expansion into South Bowl, "and at the end of the day, there's not. So the only resolution that we can offer is to avoid a SUP expansion in South Bowl."

Bail asked about the backcountry skiing that already happens there. "How are the sheep responding to that?" Department wildlife biologist Aly Courtemanch answered from her own study of the herd. "We found that basically these bighorn sheep exhibit avoidance of backcountry skiing activity, pretty strong avoidance," she said. Chairlifts, grooming, snowmaking and avalanche control are "very much above and beyond backcountry skiing impact that's already going on. ... We anticipate that they will probably just abandon the area completely."

"They used to migrate off of the Tetons, come down into lower elevation areas to spend the winter," Courtemanch said. "... So they're now living, you know, up high in the mountains year round. And in the winter, as you can imagine, in the Tetons, that winter habitat is already severely limited."

Teton County, Wyoming Commission Chair Mark Newcomb closed the block. "If the Forest Service authorizes this level of expansion, the impacts identified in the final EIS do need real, measurable, and enforceable mitigation," he said. "We did not develop a common objection together. Yet when put together, all of those objections highlight clear themes."

Bail, a former hydrologist, told the agencies they could "go technical" and asked Teton Conservation District executive director Carlin Girard where the resort's snowmaking water would come from. "My understanding is that ... there would be new wells, especially for snowmaking," Girard said. "I actually talked to the Wyoming State Engineer's Office yesterday, and according to that conversation, those rights have not currently been sought." Three of the five agencies asked the Forest Service to finish deferred groundwater dye tracing before it authorizes any construction.

Proposed resolutions by objector

After the break, the alternative that kept coming up was Alternative 3, which holds the special use permit at its existing boundary. Ken Michael, a farmer from Victor who said this was his first comment on a project, called it "a common sense compromise that allows Grand Targhee meaningfully grow its operations while preserving a critical ecosystem."

John Beller, who sits on the Teton Valley Parks and Recreation District board, asked the agency to use a power it holds and rarely exercises. A ski area's permit lets the Forest Service regulate the prices a resort charges the public, provided it does not require prices out of line with those at comparable or competing resorts. A ticket ran $3.75 when Grand Targhee opened in 1969, about $33 in today's dollars, against $180 now. Expansion raises overhead, Beller said, and overhead ends up "pushing skiing on public lands further away from the average family."

Niki Richards of Valley Advocates for Responsible Development (VARD), a local land-use advocacy nonprofit, asked that the written response address each of the group's remedies on its own terms. "A discussion runs both ways," Richards said. "Our letters set out 37 specific remedies, and we don't yet know where the agency stands on any one of them." Her first remedy was the one Bail later spoke to. Formal consultation began eight days before the FEIS was issued, Richards said, and Section 7 does not allow a decision before consultation is complete.

Katie Cheesbrough of the Wyoming Wild Sheep Foundation asked for South Bowl's removal. The draft decision offers the herd a 31-acre boundary shift and an operations plan that does not yet exist, she said. If removal fails, she asked for the forest supervisor to redo the bighorn viability analysis and "give a written response explaining why the project would go forward when the state wildlife agency says no mitigation is adequate."

Michael Whitfield's objection rested on his own fieldwork in the canyon. He monitored recreation there as a Forest Service employee in the early 1970s and, in the mid-1990s, conducted a forest owl study. He asked that the Forest Service stop short of "eliminating old-growth trees, live or dead, because of the forest owls and goshawks that use that area as habitat." He also said the base area was privatized in the 1980s on the understanding that it would hold the resort's amenities. "That was a promise that is broken with this," he said.

Grand Targhee Resort did not speak

The agenda scheduled Zeke Williams and Geordie Gillett of Grand Targhee Resort, which applied for the expansion, to speak during the session set aside for remedies. The facilitator worked through the online list, asked twice whether anyone else was waiting, and closed the segment without hearing from either man.

Interested person remarks

Yvette Converse, chief of science and resources at Grand Teton National Park, said the park backs Wyoming Game and Fish and asked that the project not add anything visible or audible from the park. About 85% of the park's visitors come to see wildlife in a native setting, she said, and winter is when the sheep can least afford to be moved. "They're not standing there, they're surviving," Converse said.

Chad Colter of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes said the tribes support Alternative 3 and asked the Forest Service to honor hunting rights under the Fort Bridger Treaty. "It's a bit shocking to me to see the current mitigation measures do not match the potential impacts," Colter said.

Close-out

Bail answered Richards' first remedy on the spot. "We are not going to be signing the record of decision until we have our Section 7 consultation and a biological opinion from the Fish and Wildlife Service."

She said she would go beyond the required written response and test whether particular remedies could work, pointing to the grazing permittee's offer to use satellite-linked GPS collars in place of fencing.

Forest Supervisor Kim Pierson, who signs the final decision, spoke last. "I heard things today that make me think about things differently, reframe my perspective on a few things," Pierson said. "What I want to honor, and I heard most, was, please, we want to work with you."

Four Agencies Asked the Forest Service to Drop South Bowl From Targhee's Expansion

Cooperating agency resolutions

Proposed resolutions by objector

Grand Targhee Resort did not speak

Interested person remarks

Close-out

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