High School Butte does not look like it holds four different chains of title. It looks like a steep dirt scar off South Park Loop Road, the kind of hill locals duck out to before dinner because it climbs fast and dries out early. Its real name, according to county maps, is Antelope Butte. Almost nobody uses that name, because almost nobody who hikes it has ever needed to know who owns the ground under their feet.
This month, ownership of the ground beneath the trail became part of the story.
The Presbyterian Church of Jackson Hole put its 3.74-acre parcel at the base of the butte on the market for $1.45 million, KHOL reported. The land includes the trailhead, the spot where South Park Loop Road meets South High Country Drive and where the switchbacks begin. For a few days, the buyer was anonymous, and residents who treat this hill as a daily habit started asking what an unknown owner might do with it.
A Hill Owned in Four Pieces
Before this sale, the butte's protection was assembled in fragments over more than twenty years by different institutions solving different problems.
An excursion column in the Jackson Hole News&Guide reports that the Henry Oliver Jr. Trust placed a 40-acre parcel near the summit under a conservation easement in 1998, granted by Emily Frew Oliver to the Jackson Hole Land Trust. That upper section was closed to public foot traffic entirely in 2013, after years of littering, social-trail damage, and even a meth lab discovered on the hillside. Below that, Buckrail reports, the Teton County School District owns the ground where the trail's switchbacks actually cut across the slope. The switchbacks were built with volunteer labor from the Land Trust, the Teton Conservation District, and Friends of Pathways starting in the mid-2000s. In 2020, the Land Trust separately bought an adjacent 18-acre parcel from a private family, brokered through agent Greg Prugh.
That left one piece unaccounted for: the 3.74 acres at the very bottom, where hikers actually step off the pavement. That piece belonged to the church after decades of goodwill. In a Jackson Hole News&Guide report, Land Trust president Max Ludington said the parcel "gets tons of use from wide swaths of the community, mostly local use."
The Sale and the Church's Housing Project
The proposed sale is connected to the church's employee-housing project.
Like many employers across the valley, the church has spent more than a decade losing valued team members to Jackson Hole's housing costs. In 2024, the Jackson Town Council approved its plan to build 21 deed-restricted townhomes for employees directly across the street from the trailhead, the Jackson Hole News&Guide reported. The first phase called for 10 of those homes. The congregation raised roughly $8.5 million toward that goal, enough to finish seven units. The remaining three homes in that first phase are what the land sale was meant to fund.
The proposed sale links the future of a favorite in-town hike to an employee-housing project playing out one street away. Board member Becky Kimmel said the leadership felt strongly about finding a buyer who would keep the trail open to the public, and by Friday's announcement, that buyer had a name: the Jackson Hole Land Trust.
What $750,000 in Sales Tax Is Set to Fund
Two business days after the Land Trust was named as the intended buyer, Teton County commissioners voted unanimously to put $750,000 toward the purchase. The money is not new taxation. It comes out of a pool voters already approved in 2022, an $8 million specific purpose excise tax, essentially a one-penny sales tax earmarked for land conservation, wildlife habitat, and public access across the county. In a Jackson Hole News&Guide report, Commissioner Natalia Macker said she hoped the funding would put lingering concern about the trail's future "to bed."
That approval covers most of the purchase price, but not all of it. As of this week, the Land Trust is still short roughly $100,000, and it is asking a private family, not the church, not the county, to close that final gap with a donation.
Why the Ask Is Foot Traffic, Not Just Money
Rather than run a straightforward fundraising campaign, the Land Trust is spending the final week of September asking people to show up and hike. From September 28 through October 3, the organization is aiming for 1,000 hikers on High School Butte, with local business partners offering after-school incentives between 3 and 6 p.m. on weekdays, including free bike tune-ups and cookies.
The logic is direct. A donor family weighing whether to fund a $100,000 gift is more likely to act if the turnout makes the case for them. A thousand pairs of boots on a short, steep trail is a harder number to argue with than a spreadsheet.
How This Hill Has Been Protected
The butte's protection has taken different forms over the years. The 1998 easement on the summit parcel and the 2020 purchase of the 18-acre parcel both kept land in private or nonprofit hands.
The trail's land has been assembled piece by piece by a school district, a family trust, a private family, and a church.
None of this changes what the hike feels like on a Tuesday evening in October. The switchbacks are the same switchbacks Friends of Pathways volunteers cut into the hillside twenty years ago. For a trail this many people in Jackson treat as a daily fixture, its future was genuinely unsettled for about a week this month.
If you want to see how it resolves, the Land Trust's hike-a-thon runs through October 3, and showing up is the whole ask.
We spend a lot of our time at The Legacy Group thinking about how land in this valley gets protected, who ends up holding it, and what that means for the people who live around it. High School Butte is a small hill with a complicated title history, and it is exactly the kind of story we like following.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
