Jackson Hole
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40 free Jackson Hole trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Jackson Hole is a high valley in the northwest corner of Wyoming, walled in by the Teton Range on one side and the Gros Ventre Range on the other. Most visitors know it for skiing, wildlife and the town of Jackson with its antler arches, but the valley's story is stranger and richer than the postcards suggest. This quiz collects the best fun facts about Jackson Hole, Wyoming: how the valley and its mountains got their names, which animals crowd in every winter, how the land around the Tetons came to be protected, and why economists, film crews and famous neighbors keep turning up. It also covers local landmarks, ski history and a natural disaster or two. It suits anyone planning a trip to Jackson or Grand Teton National Park, locals who want to test what they know, and quiz fans who like place-based trivia. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a few stories to tell on the chairlift.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Rocky IV, a Jackson Hole farm and the snowy Tetons stood in for which country?
Soviet Union
Soviet Union training scenes were really shot in and around Grand Teton National Park, so the frozen Russia on screen is Wyoming. The film's other locations were Philadelphia and Vancouver.
Q 02Grand Teton is the only US national park with which facility, serving Jackson Hole, inside its boundaries?
A commercial airport
A commercial airport sits inside the park because the runway came first: it dates from the 1930s and was absorbed when the park grew in 1950. The terminal is capped at 18 feet high to keep it out of the view.
Q 03Which rapper's 2018 album cover is his own iPhone photo of the Teton Range, taken hours before release?
Kanye West
Kanye West made the album Ye while living in Jackson Hole and premiered it at a listening party there. Five albums he produced in those weeks are known as the Wyoming Sessions.
Q 04Which actor, a longtime Jackson rancher, has flown his own helicopter on Teton County search-and-rescue missions?
Harrison Ford
Harrison Ford once recovered a lost hiker who was sick into a rescuer's cap and only later learned who her pilot was. He has given about half of his 800-acre ranch over as a nature reserve.
Q 05What made the town government that Jackson, Wyoming elected in 1920 a national curiosity?
Every member was a woman
Every member was a woman: the mayor and the whole council, who then appointed women as town marshal, clerk and treasurer. Wyoming had been first to give women the vote, half a century earlier.
Q 06Jackson Hole landed the Federal Reserve's yearly symposium partly because chairman Paul Volcker loved which pastime?
Fly fishing
Fly fishing drew the avid angler to Jackson Lake Lodge in 1982, and the lodge has been the symposium's home ever since. Central bankers and officials from some 70 countries have attended.
Q 07The name Grand Teton, usually explained as meaning 'large breast', comes from which language?
French
French voyageurs are said to have named the range les trois tétons, the three breasts. A rival theory credits the Teton Sioux, who lived about 200 miles away in the Dakotas.
Q 08Which kind of animal was 399, the Grand Teton celebrity trailed by dozens of photographers until her death in 2024?
Grizzly bear
Grizzly bear 399 got her name as the 399th of her kind that researchers fitted with a radio collar. She lived unusually close to people, taught her cubs to look both ways at roads, and reached 28.
Q 09Which photographer's 1942 picture of the Tetons and the Snake River was sent into space on the Voyager probes?
Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams's black-and-white view was encoded on the Voyager Golden Record, so it is now travelling through interstellar space. A mural-sized print sold for $988,000 in 2020.
Q 10Which youth organization began the tradition of gathering shed antlers on the National Elk Refuge to auction in Jackson?
Boy Scouts
Boy Scouts have done the job since 1968, and the renamed Scouting America still runs the yearly auction. Three-quarters of the money goes back to the refuge, where it pays to irrigate the grass the herd eats.
Q 11Which famous family's heir bought up Jackson Hole ranches through the Snake River Land Company to donate as parkland?
Rockefeller
Rockefeller money bought more than 30,000 acres, but Congress stalled the gift for years. In 1942 he threatened to sell the land off, which finally forced Washington to act.
Q 12Which president created Jackson Hole National Monument during World War II, then vetoed a bill to abolish it?
Franklin Roosevelt
Franklin Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act to act without Congress, which outraged local ranchers. Since 1950 any new national monument in Wyoming has needed the consent of Congress.
Q 13The Snake River threads the length of Jackson Hole before becoming the largest tributary of which river?
Columbia
Q 21Celebrities are often said to pick Jackson Hole for second homes because Wyoming, unlike most states, lacks which levy?
Income tax
Income tax is not charged on individuals or on companies in Wyoming. A 2019 Bloomberg study ranked Teton County first in the nation for average earnings per person.
Q 22Jackson Hole is named after Davy Jackson, who worked there in the late 1820s in which trade?
Fur trapping
Fur trapping for beaver made him one of the first outsiders to spend a whole winter there. Mountain men like him called any high valley ringed by peaks a hole.
Q 23Jackson, Wyoming has recorded a frost on every calendar date except one, which falls in which month?
July
Columbia water owes a lot to the Snake, which supplies about a fifth of the bigger river's flow to the Pacific. The Snake rises in Yellowstone and runs about 1,080 miles.
Q 14Teton Pass, the steep highway out of Jackson Hole beyond Wilson, leads drivers into which neighboring state?
Idaho
Idaho commuters use the pass daily, so when a section of the road collapsed in June 2024 they faced a detour of more than 60 miles. It reopened within three weeks.
Q 15Which future Western legend had his first leading role in The Big Trail, a 1930 epic filmed partly around Jackson?
John Wayne
John Wayne was only 23, and the film flopped so badly that he spent the rest of the decade in low-budget Westerns. Stagecoach finally made him a star in 1939.
Q 16Which post-apocalyptic video game series, later an HBO drama, makes Jackson, Wyoming home to a community of survivors?
The Last of Us
The Last of Us put Jackson on the map for gamers, yet the TV version never filmed there: the Canadian town of Canmore, Alberta, doubled for it on screen.
Q 17John Colter, the first European-American known to see Jackson Hole, had earlier explored under whose command?
Lewis and Clark
Lewis and Clark let him leave two months early, in 1806, so he could head back into the Rockies instead of going home. He reached Jackson Hole in the winter of 1807-08, on a trek of more than 500 miles.
Q 18Nick Wilson, founder of the Jackson Hole town of Wilson, had earlier ridden for which short-lived mail service?
Pony Express
Pony Express riding was only one chapter: as a child he ran away and lived with the Shoshone, where Chief Washakie's family adopted him. He told the story in a memoir published in 1910.
Q 19Which animal, the fastest land mammal in the Americas, migrates into Jackson Hole each year from the Green River basin?
Pronghorn
Pronghorn can reach 55 miles an hour, a speed built for outrunning predators. Their seasonal trek is even longer than that of the Yellowstone elk that winter near Jackson.
Q 20Which animal, hunted almost to extinction in the 1800s, now winters in a large herd on the National Elk Refuge?
Bison
Bison share the refuge each winter with an average of 7,500 elk. Its lower elevation and milder climate draw animals down from the high country around Jackson.
July 25 is the only date that has never seen freezing weather in the town's records. Jackson sits at 6,237 feet, and that elevation makes for big swings between day and night.
Q 24Which 1953 Western about a mysterious gunfighter was filmed beneath the Tetons on sets built in Jackson Hole?
Shane
Shane won the Academy Award for color cinematography, with the Grand Teton massif looming in many shots. Its frontier town and homestead were built for the shoot and demolished afterwards.
Q 25Which ski hill on the edge of downtown Jackson, known to locals as the Town Hill, was Wyoming's first ski area?
Snow King
Snow King got its first chairlift in 1946 by recycling an ore tram from Salida, Colorado, with single seats hung where the ore cars had been. It took its present name in 1938.
Q 26Which Jackson Hole ski run, entered by dropping off a cornice between rock walls, has been called America's scariest?
Corbet's Couloir
Corbet's Couloir is named for guide Barry Corbet, who spotted the chute and predicted that someone would ski it one day. Patroller Lonnie Ball did, in 1967.
Q 27The bar added to Jackson's historic Wort Hotel in 1950 has 2,032 of which objects set into its surface?
Silver dollars
Silver dollars, all uncirculated, give the Silver Dollar Bar its name. Illegal gambling was long tolerated at the hotel, and after a 1950s crackdown it retreated to a basement room known as the Snake Pit.
Q 28Which bird, the heaviest native to North America, can be found along Flat Creek on the National Elk Refuge?
Trumpeter swan
Trumpeter swan wingspans can pass ten feet, and the species is the largest waterfowl alive. Flat Creek carries on out of the refuge and straight through the town of Jackson.
Q 29Which Grand Teton beauty spot is named for the Shoshone wife of English frontiersman Richard 'Beaver Dick' Leigh?
Jenny Lake
Jenny Lake remembers a family tragedy: she and the couple's six children all died of smallpox in 1876. Nearby Leigh Lake is named for her husband.
Q 30The Tetons rise straight from Jackson Hole with no foothills because of which feature at the range's base?
A fault line
A fault line runs along the foot of the range: one block rose into the peaks while the other dropped to form the valley. The Tetons are the youngest mountains in the Rockies.