Wyoming-Idaho Commuters Say Teton Pass Detour Is Brutal

When Mary L. first came to Jackson, she lived in her car for a couple of months because she couldn’t find anything else available that fit her budget in Jackson, Wyoming, the heart of the nation’s most affluent county.

It’s a setup that she’s thinking about using once again now that her commute time from her home in Idaho has ballooned from about 40 minutes to more like three hours.

“If it’s a 9-to-5 shift, I have to leave around 6 a.m. because of the traffic that gets backed up into the canyon, and then I still have to find parking in Jackson,” she told Cowboy State Daily on Tuesday. “Before the collapse of Teton Pass, I would leave about an hour early and it would take about 40 minutes.”

The long detour to avoid the section of Highway 22 on Teton Pass that washed away Saturday now takes people south through Alpine, Wyoming, and to Jackson via Highway 89 through the Hoback Valley area.

It adds about an hour, unless traffic is backed up, in which case it can take significantly longer.

Rachel Cisto, meanwhile, told Cowboy State Daily she left her Idaho home at 5:45 a.m. for a 9 a.m. shift, figuring that was plenty of extra time.

Google Maps said it would take 2 hours and some change, but it ended up taking a lot longer.

“With all the tourists going to places and all of the other people trying to go to jobs, I didn’t get in until about 9:15 a.m.,” she said. “There’s a 6-mile stretch between the Idaho state line and the Broulin Grocery Store, and that stretch alone took me 40 minutes. Everyone else was also on 89 trying to turn toward Jackson.”

More Than An Inconvenience

A little bit of road rage peeks through now and again, Teton County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Jesse Willcox told Cowboy State Daily.

Like many who work for the TCSO and Jackson Police Department, Willcox lives in Idaho and commutes daily.

He drove his wife to her Sunday night shift at the hospital, which wasn’t too bad.

Then the two stayed overnight for their Monday shift, skipping the commuter traffic — at least until that night.

But he heard about Monday morning’s traffic, and he could see all that traffic coming into the area.

“All that traffic comes not only from the Star Valley area, but also Teton Valley, Idaho and beyond,” he said. “It came up from South Highway 89, and just the traffic was absolutely intense. The lines coming into Jackson were just bumper to bumper for several miles, and then the same way leaving Jackson (Monday) night for vehicles headed back to both Star Valley and Teton Valley.”

Areas funneling down from a two-lane into a single lane were all bottlenecked up into one space, Willcox said.

“Everybody just has to be patient,” he said. “But there’s a little bit of road rage. People trying to travel too fast and get through cars.”

Willcox saw people trying to pass multiple vehicles at a time, despite the fact that clearly wasn’t going to speed their journey and was highly risky.

“There were plenty of situations like that where people were trying to be in a rush and just ended up getting bottlenecked into the rest of the traffic,” he said.

Crashes A New Level Of Complicated

With the traffic jams come new headaches for Teton County’s commuters, Willcox said.

“We did have an accident right in town yesterday morning,” he said. “And there was pretty much nowhere for us to divert traffic for people who were headed basically eastbound into Jackson from South Highway 89 right at the intersection of West Highway 22, South Highway 89 and Broadway.”

That’s called “The Y” by locals.

“That blocked traffic for a good 30-40 minutes,” Willcox said. “And there was just nowhere to put people. They were trying to get them circulated onto small city streets and couldn’t even get people to flow through the stop signs and stoplights.”

The traffic lines were too long for the street’s ordinary capacity.

Jackson is always a little bit of a “mess” during the summertime, Willcox said.

But with Highway 22 shut down for a while, he fears it’s going to start getting “ugly” and he hopes people who have to take the long way home to Idaho like himself will take a few deep breaths as they’re making their way into and out of Jackson.

“I think the biggest thing is patience,” he said. “We’re all kind of in this together at least for the people who are having to commute around right now.”

New And Novel Ways To Get To Work Or Home

But some people are not being patient at all. Some are exploring alternative routes to work that were never designed for highway traffic at all.

“We’ve been getting complaints that there’s a (service) road from South Highway 89, it goes up Fall Creek into basically a forest road,” Willcox said. “Then it turns back into asphalt and county road, and people are cutting through that Forest Service road to get up into Wilson.”

That’s generated a lot of complaints from residents of the Red Top Meadows subdivision.

“So, instead of people following the flow of traffic up through South Highway 89 and then catching Wyoming Highway 22 out to Wilson, they’re trying to bypass it,” he said.

The trouble is, that service road is a reduced speed area and a lot of it is gravel. And it’s not necessarily well-maintained gravel either, particularly coming off the winter season.

“There’s some pretty big dirt potholes,” Willcox said. “It’s a bumpy ride.”

Make Or Break

One of the fears that Mary L. has is that the commute will turn out to be a new hammer blow to Jackson’s already short workforce.

She’s already seen for herself how the commute is adding to her bottom-line expenses.

“My expense for gas is going to triple since my commute has essentially tripled,” she said. “And the energy to cook, to make meals, I know I’m gonna have to go out more, because I’m not going to want to get home at 11 p.m. to cook a meal for that night and then the next morning get up at 5 a.m. and do it all over again.”

The extended driving also is more exhausting than she thought it would be, she said.

“Even though you’re just sedentary, you’re always kind of on alert,” she said. “You have to be very aware of your surroundings and that can be kind of exhausting when you do that for hours a day on top of an eight- to 10-hour workday.”

That leaves her feeling done at the end of a day, and so she knows she’ll spend more on conveniences she normally wouldn’t to help bridge the gap.

“Luckily I have a little bit more wiggle room, since I keep a lot of other expenses lower,” she said. “And I consider my higher rent, my extra cost of living to be like my recreation expense.”

But others are not as lucky.

“There are so many people out here who don’t have any extra wiggle room at all,” she said. “And they are truly living paycheck to paycheck. So this extra gas, extra expense for buying food when they can’t cook, that might be, you know, the straw that breaks the camel’s back and pushes them out of the area for good.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.