Our pack explored the town of Livingston on Monday May 16th from12:30-2pm. When we first started out we began by walking from a neighborhood to the main part of town. This town is surrounded by the beautiful mountains.
The houses we saw were your basic small town homes, small with a unique build for each house. There was not much of a run down part of town, which makes sense with the median house values being $164,500. One interesting thing we did notice was that instead of a rain gutter running all the way down from the gutter to the ground they had chains or little buckets of some sort.
We also spent time in a park. It was well maintained and had a swing set and play area. While walking through town we noticed a lot of antique, thrift stores, and art museums. We spoke to several friendly business owners. One commented on how she loves this town because of their sense of community even with being a tourist town as well. According to the U.S. Census, Livingston is 96% white, which was apparent while roaming around the town. Many of the businesses in Livingston uses the mountains in their logos. In our observations, Livingston is a tourist town with a small town vibe as well. Meaning Livingston does rely on tourism, but that is not the whole purpose of the town. In general, Livingston seemed to be a genuine community.
May 16, 2016
4:30pm
Location: Jackson, WY North Jackson Street to Cache Street
Jackson Hole is a flat town surrounded by mountains. We explored the section behind downtown. There were a lot of hotels in this section of town. We did notice a few smaller houses in this area. They did not compare to the hotels that we noticed. There were a couple of restaurants in this area, locally owned businesses, and smaller shops. A small park was located behind one of the hotels we saw. Walking around was difficult at times due to the lack of sidewalks behind the main part of town. Jackson Hole, WY holds 9,577 people. Housing here is expensive, typically houses range from $50,000 to over $1 million dollars with the average income being $64,345. Also, when we were walking through talk we noticed bunch of help wanted signs in multiple store windows. When talking to the people of Jackson a common theme that arose was the housing issues. One man informed us how only 3% of the land is build-able, yet so many people want to live here. This town is generally filled with tourist. It’s a tourist town. This is obvious through all the hotels that we saw in our part of town. Most of the businesses we saw were geared toured the tourist population. Another person that we spoke to had an assumption about the town. He commented on the fact that this town is pro-environment. We determined that this could be an indication of the town being left-sided. In general, the people of Jackson were welcoming to the tourist community, but had serious concerns regarding property values and development.
Our journey through the GYE
