DOI purchases 640-acre Kelly parcel within Grand Teton National Park
January 3, 2025
The Department of the Interior (DOI) has announced the completion of a purchase of a 640-acre parcel of land from the State of Wyoming within Grand Teton National Park in northwest Wyoming. The parcel, known as the Kelly parcel, is a one square mile of State School Trust land inholding within the Park.
The purchase price for the property was $100 million. The purchase was made possible through an Interior Department and National Park Service (NPS) public-private partnership with the Grand Teton National Park Foundation and additional support from the National Park Foundation. The Department invested $62.4 million from the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) paired with $37.6 million in private donations raised by Grand Teton National Park Foundation. All $100 million from the sale will directly benefit Wyoming’s public education system.
The closing on the Kelly parcel completes an effort that spanned decades to exchange, trade or sell the State-owned School Trust land within Grand Teton National Park. A Wyoming constitutional mandate requires that school trust lands, created at statehood in 1890, must generate income for the common school trust. Since the late 1990s, Wyoming’s congressional delegation, governor and state legislature have worked to resolve this inholding challenge. The late U.S. Senator Craig Thomas passed legislation in 2003 to authorize exchanges, sales or trades that would compensate the State of Wyoming for the Grand Teton school section inholdings. The second-to-last school section in the park, known as Antelope Flats, was purchased by the NPS in 2016 for $46 million, which was made possible by $23 million in philanthropic support raised by Grand Teton National Park Foundation and the National Park Foundation that matched $23 million from the LWCF.
The parcel increases the Grand Teton National Park landscape connectivity to habitat of Yellowstone National Park with the Bridger-Teton and Caribou-Targhee National Forests, including the Upper Green River Valley and the Wind River, Gros Ventre, and Wyoming Range mountains. The parcel is part of an important link for elk, mule deer, and pronghorn migration corridors that stretch to public, private and Tribal lands hundreds of miles away.
|
