Trey Scharp received the phone call of a lifetime on his birthday.
It was December 2025, and the owners of the historic Flat Creek Ranch northeast of Jackson, Joe Albright and Marcia Kunstel, were calling with an unexpected question.
Would Trey and his wife, Shelby, like to own the ranch they had managed for more than two decades?
Albright and Kunstel, longtime journalists whose careers were built on documenting history, weren’t offering to sell the ranch.
They wanted to give it away.
“It was truly an amazing birthday phone call,” Shelby Scharp told Cowboy State Daily.
Seven months later, the Scharps are settling into their first season not just as managers but as owners of a 140-acre guest ranch tucked beneath the iconic Sleeping Indian in the Gros Ventre Mountains.
In a valley where ranches routinely sell for tens of millions of dollars and development pressure never lets up, Albright and Kunstel chose a different path.
"We didn't want it to fall in the hands of someone who would destroy the land, the wildlife or the buildings," Kunstel told Cowboy State Daily. "It deserves to be maintained."
The couple explained their motivation in a newspaper advertisement announcing the transfer: “Why are we doing all this? To keep our 103-year-old Ranch from falling into the wake of Jackson’s rush to develop mega-mansions and hulking hotels.”
As part of the gift, the Scharps agreed not to sell the ranch for at least 10 years and pledged to preserve its historic cabins, off-grid infrastructure and operation as a guest ranch.
More Than Real Estate
For Albright and Kunstel, both retired foreign correspondents, the decision was about conservation as much as succession.
"We felt that giving this land to people with the talents and background that Trey and Shelby have was the best way to keep this ranch going for another 100 years," Albright told Cowboy State Daily.
The couple spent 27 years restoring and preserving the ranch after buying it back from the Jackson Hole Land Trust in 1998. By then, many of the 1920s-era cabins had fallen into disrepair.
An extensive restoration project returned the historic buildings to life while modernizing the ranch behind the scenes. Today it operates entirely off solar power with a custom-designed water system. The property was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2001 and reopened as a guest ranch that same year.
Its history stretches back even further. A timeline on the ranch’s website is full of gems – characters and moments that have cemented the ranch’s place in time.
“There are a million stories within the big story,” Shelby said.
In the summer of 1900, cowboy Enoch “Cal” Carrington camped on the land for a few days while working as a cook on a hunting expedition. Carrington returned the following summer, staked his claim and built a small cabin.
In 1917, Cal met Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson – Albright’s great aunt – at the Bar BC Ranch, where Patterson was staying as a guest. Carrington was the head hunting guide.
Carrington obtained a patent for a homestead in 1922 and sold the property to Patterson a year later, for $5,000. Patterson was an heiress to the Chicago Tribune.
Later, her niece and Albright’s mother, Josephine Patteron, would own the property.
In 1928, Cissy Patterson hired a man named Farney Cole to be caretaker. Cole famously beat a black bear to death with a waterlogged aspen limb in 1944. He had been using the limb to break up a beaver dam on the property when the bear, which had two cubs with her, attacked him.
Cissy longed to host Saturday night dances in the lodge at the ranch, and she made that dream come true in 1929, when she had a grand piano shipped to the ranch from Chicago. The instrument was hauled up the primitive bumpy road on an ox cart. It is still in use today.
Instead of selling the century-old Flat Creek Ranch for millions, a Jackson couple gave the property to its longtime managers. "We didn't want it to fall in the hands of someone who would destroy the land, the wildlife or the buildings," they said. (Flat Creek Ranch Photo) 
Instead of selling the century-old Flat Creek Ranch for millions, a Jackson couple gave the property to its longtime managers. "We didn't want it to fall in the hands of someone who would destroy the land, the wildlife or the buildings," they said. (Flat Creek Ranch Photo) 
Instead of selling the century-old Flat Creek Ranch for millions, a Jackson couple gave the property to its longtime managers. "We didn't want it to fall in the hands of someone who would destroy the land, the wildlife or the buildings," they said. (Flat Creek Ranch Photo)
Jackson Gambling Scene
For a few weeks, Flat Creek Ranch was party to a thriving gambling scene in Jackson in the 1950s, As gambling raids swept through Jackson, hotel staff drove their guests out to the ranch, where a casino room was set up.
In 1986, Josephine Albright donated Flat Creek Ranch to the Jackson Hole Land Trust to guarantee the land’s permanent protection. She ensured that her heirs would have the first option to buy back the ranch at an appraised price upon her death.
Albright and Kunstel had not intended to buy the ranch in 1998, but they fell in love with Jackson and were ready to retire from longtime journalism careers.
The 1920s-era cabins remained on the land but were in desperate need of maintenance and restoration.
Contractor Porgy McClelland headed an ambitious restoration project that lasted four years. Cabins were moved and some were taken apart and put back on new foundations.
During the process, McClelland found old newspapers stuffed between logs for chinking.
According to an article in Jackson Hole Magazine, “He opened up one and found a box score for a baseball game in which Babe Ruth hit two home runs. It disintegrated into dust before he could share it too widely.” -
When the ranch was turning 100, Shelby suggested Albright and Kunstel write a book chronicling the history of the ranch.
“They jumped in with both feet and did this incredible coffee table book,” Shelby said.
Albright and Kunstel leaned heavily on newspapers.com during the writing of the book, Flat Creek Ranch: Cissy and Cal Launch a Rip-Roaring Jackson Hole Saga. Newspapers on the platform date to 1911 for the city of Jackson. They also searched land records that told traces of stories.
Instead of selling the century-old Flat Creek Ranch for millions, a Jackson couple gave the property to its longtime managers. "We didn't want it to fall in the hands of someone who would destroy the land, the wildlife or the buildings," they said. (Flat Creek Ranch Photo) 
Instead of selling the century-old Flat Creek Ranch for millions, a Jackson couple gave the property to its longtime managers. "We didn't want it to fall in the hands of someone who would destroy the land, the wildlife or the buildings," they said. (Flat Creek Ranch Photo)
An Unexpected Opportunity
The Scharps’ connection to Albright and Kunstel happened unexpectedly, in the early 2000s. The Scharps were managing a fly fishing lodge in Patagonia, Chile, when guests Joan and Huntley Baldwin mentioned friends in Jackson who were looking for ranch managers.
When Trey heard the name "Flat Creek Ranch," he wasn't immediately interested.
Growing up in Jackson, he remembered it as a neglected property.
He told his wife, “I don’t think we can make a go out of it with an old ranch that is falling apart.”
The Scharps used the satellite internet they were only supposed to use to email their boss in Santiago to do a Google search of Flat Creek Ranch.
“The page loaded so slowly,” Shelby said. “The first five minutes were just pictures of a blue sky.”
But when the entire page finally loaded, Trey was stunned.
“We realized the ranch had been completely refurbished,” he said.
Later, the Scharps would walk to a phone booth in the middle of nowhere, at a crossroads in rural Chile where busses sometimes stopped. Chickens pecked at their feet as they picked up the phone and called Albright and Kunstel.
“I think we had the job two weeks later,” Trey said.
Carrying The Legacy Forward
Within their almost 23-year-stint of the ranch’s bigger story, Trey said he can’t think of one memory that trumps all the others; there are too many.
“But there was that bald eagle,” he said. “We watched it take a Canada goose out of the lake.”
Learning that Kunstel and Albright wanted to give them the ranch was a total shock, Shelby told Cowboy State Daily.
During that December phone call, Shelby was nervous at the outset. She said she immediately wondered how she and her husband could afford to take on such an astounding piece of Teton County.
“And then I looked over at Trey and saw how grateful he was and thought, 'I need to be more like that',” she said.
The Scharps have agreed to own and preserve the ranch for the next 10 years. Its future is open-ended after that. They could decide to hold onto it, sell it or transfer it to a younger generation of the Albright family.
“We understood what Joe and Marcia wanted their guests to feel while they’re here,” Shelby said. “We never diverged from that.”
Now that the ranch is entirely in their hands, Trey said they will continue to improve the infrastructure, to keep the 100-plus-year-old cabins looking as good as they did in 2004, when he and Shebly saw the property together for the first time.
Being owners and managers is “the epitome of ‘same same but different',” Shelby said.
The daily grind hasn’t changed. But now, when she walks across a beloved bridge on the property in the early mornings, the reality sinks in: “It’s quiet and it’s like, ‘Oh, this is ours',” Shelby said.
“We’re not luxury. We’re authentic,” Trey said. “It’s authenticity here.”
He added that in the gift is a powerful message about land stewardship: “Not everything is for sale.”
Kate Meadows can be reached at kate@cowboystatedaily.com.
