Jackson Hole cyclist resuscitates 40-year debate over public access to Snake River levees

JACKSON—A longtime Teton County resident is resuscitating a decades-long debate over public access to levees on the Snake River.

When Scott Bradley moved to Jackson 23 years ago, he could ride his bike up and down the levees on the west bank of the Snake River, all the way up to Snake River Ranch. Then, he started to see construction along the river. As new homes went up, so did gates.

“It ruined my favorite Jackson Hole activity,” Bradley said. “It killed the most healthy, soul-shaping activity I had in my daily routine.”

Bradley has been reaching out to county officials and nonprofit groups to see what can be done to open the levees to the public.

In a town where many residents don’t lock their bikes, cars and homes, the gates can come as a surprise. The proliferation of gates is perplexing even to those who maintain the levees.

“For whatever reason, some of your county inhabitants don’t like people walking in front of them,” said Kenny Koebberling, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Jackson levee project manager.

Property owners putting up gates on the levees is unambiguously legal, though the phenomenon has been a matter of consternation for some since the 1980s. The levees are public infrastructure — in that Teton County and the Army Corps maintain them using tax dollars — but often they are on private property.

That explanation isn’t satisfying to some. In 2025, the Corps’ budget for Snake levee maintenance is $357,000, of which Teton County must pay $117,000. Building and maintaining the levees has cost tens of millions of dollars — if not hundreds of millions, when adjusted for inflation — over the years.

“To exclude the public from a facility that the public paid to be built and paid to maintain, that’s a bad deal,” said Teton County Commissioner Len Carlman.

But those who support private property rights on the levees say that, even gated, the levees serve the public good by preventing Wilson from flooding. That, they argue, is what taxpayers are paying for.

“It doesn’t only protect the homeowners that are there,” Koebberling said. “Everything on the west side is protected by those levees, pretty much.”

While property owners have been putting gates up on the levees for more than 40 years, it has picked up in the last decade or so.

It ruined my favorite Jackson Hole activity.

Scott Bradley

“In the ‘60s, anybody could drive anywhere on those levees,” Koebberling said. “In general, as the parcels have been sold off and subdivided, more people are wanting to restrict access.”

Koebberling and Tony Havel, manager of the county’s Road and Levee Department, said the northwest stretch of levees has the highest concentration of gates. A reporter counted 10 gates in the 7-mile stretch of levees from the Wilson Boat Ramp upstream to the Snake River Ranch during a ride-along with Road and Levee.

The southeast side also is gated near Highway 22. A subdivision on the southwest levee, however, has decided that it is okay with public use of the levee, leading to about 2.5 miles of public access. The northeast portion of the levee has public access on U.S. Bureau of Land Management parcels.

A levee is born

There are 33 miles of federally managed levees on the Snake. The federal government originally built the levees to protect ranch land, of which not much remains. The government obtained easements from landowners for construction, which took place between 1962 and 1964. The county and the Army Corps have easements to maintain them.

The levees created buildable land that was once floodplain. Before the levees, some people grazed cattle by the river, but no one was particularly concerned about ownership.

“Before they built the levees, people didn’t really care too much,” said Rich Greenwood, who built Teton County’s original GIS. “Then all of a sudden there was a whole bunch of land that could be developed.”

Litigation began shortly thereafter and continued for almost 20 years.

In the West, the “thread” — or center line — of the river is traditionally the boundary line for riverside properties. This concept, known as riparian law, meant that even if the river naturally meandered away from a property, a landowner wouldn’t lose access to a river that he might be depending on for agriculture or commerce.

In the 1960s, the government began resurveying land along the Snake River, claiming that the original survey was erroneous and calling into question the ownership of about 7,000 acres of land along a 22-mile stretch of the river, from Grand Teton National Park to the South Park Bridge.

Before they built the levees, people didn’t really care too much.

Rich Greenwood

The government claimed that the lands touching the meander line of the river actually belonged to the government, arguing that the original surveyors omitted riparian land because it was policy at the time to survey only land with agricultural value.

In 1966, the BLM sued Paul Walton, of the Walton Ranch, for quiet title to lands on the east bank of the Snake. In 1969, Judge Ewing Kerr ruled in favor of the BLM, which is why there is public land on the east bank of the river.

“All the BLM parcels were a result of litigation between the United States and private landowners,” Greenwood said.

In 1974, Snake River Ranch sued the government for quiet title to 55 acres of land that the owners feared the government would come after. Kerr ruled in the ranch’s favor, based on riparian law.

Despite the ruling, the government still believed it had a shot of taking ownership of thousands acres of riparian land along the Snake. U.S. Attorney Tosh Suyematsu said there were distinctive features of the Snake River Ranch case that would not come up in other cases. At the time of the Snake River Ranch decision, the government was in the process of suing more than 100 landowners for ownership of 3,236 acres along 22 miles of river.

Landowners claimed that they owned the land through riparian law, as their property ran to the center line of the river before the levees were built and controlled the meandering nature of the river, creating dry areas where land once flooded periodically.

Department of Justice attorneys claimed that the land existed in its present form when the original survey took place in 1893 and had been excluded from the survey, making it federal property. Attorneys for the government used trees, rocks and silt as evidence to try to prove that the lands existed before the survey.

In 1983, Judge Kerr determined that 400 acres of the land did belong to the government, and the rest belonged to landowners. The government spent nearly $1 million on the case and could have been on the hook for $400,000 in landowners’ legal fees if the verdict was appealed.

Teton County Deputy Attorney Keith Gingery said the government’s case had legs.

“The U.S. government would have probably won in the end,” he said. “If they had won, there would have been no big homes along the Snake River. There would have been no John Dodge. It would have been one big national park that would go down into the center of the valley.”

The case went up to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit a few times and was sent back to the district court each time, Gingery said. The appeals court kept saying that the land plausibly could be government property, but attorneys for the government needed to make a better case for its position.

“Depending on who you ask, it was a real miss from the judges who interpreted legal access,” said Orion Hatch, executive director of the Snake River Fund.

The case led to settlements with the landowners to allow for recreational easements that permit river users to get out of their boats, walk around on sand and gravel bars and anchor their boats. But the easements specifically prohibited levee-top access.

“Really what the federal government was after was making sure the public had access to the river,” Gingery said.

Levee wars

Property owners began gating off the levees soon after, emboldened by the ruling in favor of property rights.

In January 1984, State Sen. Tom Stroock, a Casper Republican and chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, started a movement to cut state funding for levee maintenance until landowners removed “no trespassing” signs from the levees.

He said it was unconstitutional for the state to appropriate funds for private entities.

“If the dikes are private property, then there is a constitutional question,” he told the Jackson Hole News at the time. “If the dikes are public, it is appropriate for public money to be spent on them and I will support it. If they are public, they shouldn’t be posted and there shouldn’t be barbed wire fences.”

Teton County officials and state representatives were concerned that if the state withheld funding, the federal government would follow suit. Stroock relinquished his position after county leaders convinced him that without maintenance, floods could impact many landowners, not just those with riverfront properties.

Stroock owned a place in Teton Village and had encountered the signs himself while fishing, said John Turner, who represented Moose in the state Senate at the time.

“We went to battle over this,” Turner said. “Landowners had a right, as they do to any of their lands. Maintaining those dikes did not give access for skiing, biking and whatever. That did not grant us the right to traipse around on private property.”

Turner felt strongly about the funding issue because of the potential for damage across the entire floodplain.

Until the early 1990s, the levees were still open to cars. In 1991, landowners on the south side of the river began organizing to get the levees shut off to traffic, arguing that cars were turning the levees into a tent village and landfill.

At the time, the Jackson Hole News wrote an editorial in favor of keeping the levees open to traffic.

“In the course of the past decade public access to the levees along the Snake and Gros Ventre rivers has been systematically eliminated,” the editorial stated. “Although the dikes were built with public money to protect private lands from flooding, a series of court rulings awarded control of the levees to landowners who quickly slapped up gates and no trespassing signs.”

Gates beget gates

The rise of gates can be attributed to greater landowner confidence in their own property lines, an uptick in subdivided property and increased development generally.

Landowner Tom Kalishman declined to comment on his rationale for putting up a gate.

Landowners originally wanted gates on the levees to keep their cattle from wandering, Turner said. There aren’t many cows on the West Bank anymore, and the only large cattle operation left is Snake River Ranch, according to the Road and Levee Department. But the decrease in cattle actually has led to an increase in gates.

The number of gates on the levees has doubled in the past 20 years, according to Road and Levee estimates.

Landowners had a right, as they do to any of their lands. Maintaining those dikes did not give access for skiing, biking and whatever. That did not grant us the right to traipse around on private property.

John turner

The Corps is trying to dissuade landowners from installing gates in the most-gated sections of river, such as the northwest levees. The county and the Corps have keys to all the gates, but the proliferation of obstacles could hinder their ability to respond to an emergency.

“I don’t want 1,000 gates on the levee because when I’m doing emergency repairs, my truck drivers have to get in and out,” Koebberling said. “At some point, it’s not that beneficial, anyway.”

Koebberling has been reluctant to impose an outright ban on gates, fearing that a “blanket rule” would provoke litigious landowners. But he has been trying to persuade landowners with security concerns that there are “different ways to skin a cat than putting up another gate.

“The county and I have had discussions that if the top of the levee is secured and the bottom of the levee is secured, why do we need all these gates in between?” Koebberling said. “There’s plenty in that John Dodge area, there’s more than enough.”

Some landowners do not even want government employees on their property to conduct maintenance. “There have been people who have made attempts at impeding us,” Koebberling said. “The county attorney gets involved and straightens it up pretty quick.”

Up by Solitude, property owners take care of their own maintenance, which some attribute to those property owners’ desire to steer clear of the government altogether. Some of the levees in that area also were built privately.

Gingery has encountered landowners who are upset when they see river users outside their properties.

“As more and more wealthy people buy into our valley, they think they bought the river,” Gingery said, citing an interaction with a property owner who was angry about seeing “a bunch of regular Jackson people hanging out and fishing” on the river near his home.

“He thought he had his own little private river,” Gingery said.

Paths forward

Besides Bradley’s one-man crusade against gates on the levees, there isn’t much of an appetite to try to overturn the 40-year-old legal precedent on the matter.

“It would be an amazing resource to be able to head north all the way up to Grand Teton National Park,” the Snake River Fund’s Hatch said. “Unfortunately, that’s not the reality.”

The status quo is rooted in litigation, not public policy, Commissioner Carlman said.

Granting public access to the levees either would require federal legislation, litigation or landowners coming together to provide recreational easements for levee-top access — all of which would take a lot of money, effort or both.

“My experience is that many of these landowners don’t have the appetite for increasing public access,” Hatch said. “When you have private landowners putting up gates, it’s not the best start.”