A couple of cowboys cleared brush in the 1930s and Laurence Rockefeller looked the other way. The national park boundary closed around the airfield in 1943 and never moved it out. Today KJAC is the only commercial airport in the United States located entirely inside a national park — and the first airport in the world certified Dark Sky.
A Pirep featured story · KJAC Jackson Hole, Jackson, WY
In the early 1930s, before there was a Grand Teton National Park, two ranch hands cleared sagebrush off a flat stretch of valley floor seven miles north of Jackson, Wyoming, and called it a runway. The land was owned by Laurence Rockefeller, whose family had been quietly buying up Jackson Hole for years with the long-term intention of donating it to the federal government. Rockefeller looked the other way. By the late 1930s the dirt strip was hosting mail and cargo flights.
In 1929 Congress had created Grand Teton National Park, but locals had protested any federal takeover of the valley floor, and the park was initially limited to just the Teton Range itself — the peaks and the lakes. In 1943 President Franklin Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act to declare the valley a national monument over local objections. Teton County commissioners called the move illegitimate. The airport, by then a functioning commercial field, found itself suddenly inside a federal preserve. In 1950 Congress merged Jackson Hole National Monument into Grand Teton National Park, formalizing the boundary. Western Airlines had already started commercial passenger service in 1941. Frontier Airlines began DC-3 routes to Denver, Salt Lake City, and Billings in 1959.
The airport has been an existential question for the National Park Service ever since. The Sierra Club sued more than once to shut it down. In the 1960s and 1970s the park successfully blocked a proposed runway extension to 8,000 feet that would have allowed mainline jet operations. Jets eventually slipped in anyway, on the existing 6,300-foot runway, but only under a noise abatement plan more restrictive than any other commercial airport in the United States. In 2007 Stage II aircraft were banned outright by act of Congress. In 2013 the FAA published a NextGen approach that reduced flight time over the most noise-sensitive parts of the park.
The terminal is height-limited to 18 feet to stay below the sightlines of the Teton Range — and was completely rebuilt between 2009 and 2014 to that constraint, winning an AIA honor award in the process. There are no jet bridges; passengers walk down airstairs onto the ramp with the entire Teton Range filling the western horizon. An antler arch frames the entrance. JFK landed here in an Army helicopter on September 25, 1963. Air Force Two parked here regularly during Dick Cheney's vice presidency. The land beneath the runway is critical sage grouse mating habitat; aircraft operations are scheduled around the lek.
In 2022, KJAC became the first airport in the world certified by DarkSky International — every light on the field shielded to keep the night sky pristine for the wildlife and the visitors. The runway sits at 6,451 feet elevation. Density altitude in summer can push 9,000 feet. Most pilots flying in remember the Tetons in the windshield more than they remember the runway.