Kelly Halpin was folding laundry in her bedroom Wednesday night when she heard the crash.
She looked outside. Smoke was everywhere.
Halpin grabbed her husband and ran down the driveway near the base of Teton Pass toward Wyoming Highway 22. A house guest who had been outside was already running toward the highway.
There, in the middle of the road, was a gooseneck trailer surrounded by rocks and debris.
“The truck was off on the north side of the road, just totally mangled,” Halpin told Cowboy State Daily on Thursday morning.
Wyoming Highway Patrol's preliminary investigation says a Ford F-250 pulling a trailer was headed eastbound down Teton Pass shortly after 8 p.m. Wednesday when it began gaining speed.
The pickup crossed from the eastbound lane into the westbound lane before leaving the highway on the left side. It entered a barrow ditch leading toward an uphill driveway.
The driveway became a ramp, and the Ford launched into the air, rolled, and landed on its driver's side on the opposite side, WHP reports.
Passenger Javier Deluna Chavez, 41, of Colorado, was killed. The crash injured one other person.
WHP lists speed and another, unspecified factor as possible contributors to the crash. The highway was dry and the weather clear.
It happened at milepost 6.5, just outside Jackson, and involved only the pickup and its trailer.
The Teton County Sheriff's Office told Cowboy State Daily that its deputies responded to the crash but referred questions about the investigation to the Highway Patrol.
People Came Running
Once Halpin found the truck, she also found people already trying to help.
One man was walking around the scene. Halpin, who has wilderness first responder training, stayed with him.
The other occupant had been thrown roughly 35 to 40 feet from the truck, she said.
Others had already reached him.
Halpin recalled a ski patroller and another person with first-responder experience tending to the badly injured man.
Then more people came.
Motorists stopped and climbed out of their vehicles. Neighbors ran from their homes. Someone brought water. Others began moving rocks and wreckage out of the highway so emergency vehicles could get through.
“I just feel like, you know, if you see something, you just try to help,” Halpin said.
“There were a lot of people who came to help last night. It certainly wasn't just me and my husband and my guest.”
People joined in, she said, doing whatever they could until the professionals arrived.
Eventually came the deputies, ambulances and other emergency crews.
For Halpin, it has become a far too familiar scene.
‘It's Become Normal’
Halpin lives near the bottom of the pass.
That means she doesn't just read about its crashes afterward.
She hears them.
“Unfortunately, it's become normal to either see the crashes first-hand or hear all the ambulances and sirens going to the crash sites,” she said.
Wednesday's fatal wreck arrived amid a summer in which Teton Pass safety has become an increasingly urgent issue for people living on both sides of the mountains.
The road itself is an engineering challenge.
WYDOT says Teton Pass was built in the 1960s with grades reaching 10%, substantially steeper than the roughly 5% to 6% grade generally considered safe for most vehicles in highway design.
The department imposes a 60,000-pound gross vehicle weight restriction on the mountain section of Highway 22.
Yet the road carries an enormous variety of traffic: Commuters traveling between Idaho and Jackson, commercial vehicles, pickups towing trailers, RVs, tourists, cyclists and recreational traffic.
On Thursday morning, less than a day after the fatal crash, she looked outside while speaking with Cowboy State Daily.
“I'm just watching — it's backed up past my house right now,” she said.
That's nothing unusual anymore.
“All summer it's backed up all the way up the pass,” she said.
How Many Wrecks?
This summer has given residents reason to pay particularly close attention.
A July 7 runaway dump truck crash on Teton Pass killed two people and injured others.
Other serious crashes involving RVs, trailers and larger vehicles followed.
The succession of wrecks helped spur Citizens to Make Teton Pass Safer, a community coalition seeking immediate restrictions and longer-term changes to the highway.
The group isn't asking Wyoming to close the pass to trucks and trailers.
Its current push includes permanent variable-message signs and highway advisory radio stations at key decision points, giving RVs, trucks and vehicles towing trailers a chance to divert through Snake River Canyon south of Jackson Hole before beginning the climb.
They are also working with transportation officials on better signage and messaging stretching from eastern Idaho to Hoback. Trucking companies are discussing GPS warnings for their drivers, while Apple has told the group it will try to incorporate Teton Pass warnings into its navigation app.
The idea is to reach drivers before they commit to the mountain — particularly people in RVs, rental trucks and vehicles towing trailers who might be following a phone rather than roadside warnings.
At the same time, committee members say they're exploring ways to improve driver preparation and vehicle condition without shutting Teton Pass to commercial traffic altogether.
From Halpin's front porch, the issue is more complicated than it appears on paper.
“There are plenty of people who are very safe drivers and obviously are very, very good at driving mountain passes, even with heavier loads,” she said.
Businesses rely on the highway. So do workers. So do people moving between communities on opposite sides of the pass.
Restricting traffic has consequences, but on the other hand, “We're also seeing people, you know, killed every few weeks here,” she said.
Kolby Fedore can be reached at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com.
