Elk 1

5/23/17 – 8:30 am

We were assigned to the main area of town where the park and many tourist shops are. On our way there, we noticed that there are a lot of real estate agencies lining the streets. The plethora of these agencies could say something about the socioeconomic status of the town. While many people we talked to were complaining about the lack of housing, these agencies sold high dollar homes, which indicates the lack of a middle class.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BUc4ldzjUT4/?taken-by=elk1luynp

Many of the buildings downtown were very close and clustered around each other because they can’t spread out due to the small amount of privately owned land. Also, many of the buildings were in an old west style, they had wooden siding and were adorned with elk antlers. The land if the middle of town was very flat, but looking outside of the town all you could see was the mountains and scenic landscape- the reason people come here.

 

We continued to walk through the shops, which were obviously geared toward tourists as many of them sold t-shirts and souvenirs. While walking we noticed many of the shops had “now hiring” signs posted on the doors. These public documents indicate that the town is in need of workers to support its tourist economy. We finally, made it to what was like a gigantic public document, the Welcome Center, where we talked with Rick Nelson who works for the Chamber of Commerce. In talking with him, we learned that the center is most tourist’s first stop as they enter the town to find out what they should do. He told us that the reason the town is called Jackson Hole is that it was named after a trapper, Danny Jackson. The Welcome Center was very informative and had a lot of public documents that showed us a lot about the history of the town and the wildlife. One interesting public document we saw at the Welcome Center was a sign above the toilet that indicated how to correctly use American bathrooms. This is just another example to show how much of an impact the tourism industry has on the town.

(Sign in the Welcome Center bathroom)

https://www.instagram.com/p/BUdhGO9jMxw/?taken-by=elk1luynp

Next, we went to the Snake River Angler where we talked to Jack and Alex about their experience living and working in the town and their opinions of tourists. They stated that, “Chinese people come because they love the American West.” After this statement, we began to notice that a lot of the tourist population was Asian. he said that the tourists are what keep this economy alive so they are thankful. Alex also said that a big problem is that most people make relatively decent wages, but are unable to afford housing. Because of this some people will squeeze like 12 people into a 2 bedroom house.

We ended our exploration at the front desk of the hotel and talked with Dan about some of the controversial issues in the area. He had just been to a wolf meeting the night before and was showing us on a map the areas where wolves are protected and cannot be hunted. He seemed to believe that wolves should be hunted everywhere because they can harm humans and cattle. Even though the wolf issue is controversial, he told us that the bears being taken off the endangered species list is an even more controversial issue. In asking about elk, he said that once a year they have season setting meetings to determine the population sizes they want to maintain and how many hunting licenses to sell. In talking about all of these regulations, one thing he said that really stood out to was was, “sometimes there is too much government.” This really hit home as we thought about what is really important the people or the place? After our talk with Dan, we headed back to the vans for our adventure to Jenny Lake!

Here is a map of our morning: