For more than a century, the Tetons have drawn climbers into a stark apprenticeship of stone, weather, and will. From disputed first ascents to the disciplined “clean climbing” ethos of the 1960s and 1970s, Jackson Hole became a proving ground for a distinctly American alpinism, where the legacy of mountaineering endures and evolves as each new generation rises to meet it.
For more than a century, the Tetons have drawn climbers into a stark apprenticeship of stone, weather, and will. From disputed first ascents to the disciplined “clean climbing” ethos of the 1960s and 1970s, Jackson Hole became a proving ground for a distinctly American alpinism, where the legacy of mountaineering endures and evolves as each new generation rises to meet it.
Long before ropes and pitons, before down vests and nylon shells, the Tetons were known to Native peoples who moved seasonally through the valley, hunting, trading, and scaling the mountains for commemoration and ceremony. It was only in the late nineteenth century, as surveyors, climbers, and romantics pressed west, that the Grand Teton in particular became an object of obsession.
Who first stood atop its 13,775-foot summit remains a matter of dispute. In 1872, members of the Hayden Geological Survey claimed the ascent. Their account was contested decades later by climbers who scrutinized the route and found it improbable with the equipment of the time. In 1898, William Owen, Franklin Spalding, Frank Petersen, and John Shive reached the summit by what is now recognized as the Owen-Spalding Route, a line that would become the mountain’s standard passage. Others followed. The mountain had entered the American imagination.
By the 1920s and 1930s, a distinct climbing culture had begun to take shape in Jackson Hole. Figures like Paul Petzoldt, who made his first ascent of the Grand as a teenager in 1924, helped define a new ethic of mountain craft. Petzoldt would go on to found the Petzoldt-Exum Guide School, which later became Exum Mountain Guides, with Glenn Exum, whose 1931 solo ascent of the Grand’s exposed ridge—now known as the Exum Ridge—remains a rite of passage. These were not aristocratic alpinists in the European mold. They were pragmatic, inventive, self-taught. They learned by doing, by failing, by returning the next season better prepared.
In 1929, Grand Teton National Park was established, formalizing what Native peoples and the burgeoning climbing community had already understood: this was sacred ground for those drawn to altitude. The Civilian Conservation Corps cut trails and built infrastructure in the 1930s, but the high peaks remained largely untouched. The rock demanded fluency, and the weather could turn quickly. A clear morning could collapse into an electrical storm by afternoon, climbers crouched on ledges as thunder cracked across the cirque.
After World War II, the tempo quickened. Equipment improved—nylon ropes replaced hemp, steel carabiners supplanted the heavier hardware of earlier decades. By the 1950s and 1960s, American climbers were looking not only to Europe’s Alps, but inward, toward their own ranges. The Tetons became a proving ground. Technical routes on the Grand, the Middle Teton, Teewinot, and Mount Moran drew a new generation hungry for exposure and clean lines.
It was the 1960s and 1970s, however, that gave Jackson Hole its particular mythology. Across the American West, a countercultural current ran through climbing communities. Dirtbags and philosophers, ski bums and conservationists gathered in loose, weather-beaten clusters at the base of improbable walls. They lived cheaply, worked seasonally, and measured wealth in days spent high above the valley floor.
In the Tetons, this ethos took on a specific character, one that was less bombastic, more austere than Yosemite’s big-wall scene. The approaches were long. The granite was cold. Success required patience, judgment, and a tolerance for consequence. Climbers spoke of “clean” ascents, minimizing bolts and fixed protection, moving over the stone with a kind of deliberate restraint. Technique and style mattered.
At the heart of it all was the valley itself. Jackson was not yet the polished enclave it would become. It was still rough-edged, a place where outfitters, ranchers, and climbers shared bar stools and stories. Gear was repaired, handed down, modified in garages. Down jackets were patched, ropes coiled and recoiled until they held the memory of a hundred belays. There was an intimacy between body and landscape, between necessity and invention.
Today, the Tetons remain what they have long been: exacting and magnetic, containing a history of mountaineering that represents both a procession of heroes and a lineage of return. Each generation studies the same faces of stone, ties in at the same ledges, and steps into the same thin air. Equipment changes, attitudes shift. The granite remains.
WRITTEN BY JMM
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