Where traffic stops happen in Jackson Hole, and why.

One road, two governments, and a moose in the middle of it

The Moose-Wilson Road runs fifteen miles from Highway 22 east of Wilson to Moose, seven of them inside Grand Teton National Park. The county portion is Wyoming Highway 390, which everyone here calls the Village Road, and the park portion begins at the Granite Canyon Entrance Station a short distance north of Teton Village. The Village Road is where the "speed trap" searches come from, and the reason is the sequence: 55 approaching the Village, then 45, then 35 when the sun is down, on a road lined with willows that moose walk out of. The sheriff's office told the News&Guide in July 2025 that its deputies made 111 stops on the road in 2024 and 85 in the first half of 2025, not counting the Highway Patrol, and that DUI arrests on the corridor have run about five a year for five years. When 28 moose died on county roads in 2019, four of them here, the commissioners asked WYDOT to lower the daytime limit; WYDOT studied it in 2020 and declined, and a citizen-funded program then paid off-duty deputies to patrol the road at dawn and dusk until the county attorney questioned the arrangement.

Everything changes at the entrance station. The compendium posts 15 approaching it, 20 from the station to the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve, and 25 from Granite Creek Bridge north to Sawmill Ponds, and the superintendent has closed the road to anything more than eight feet wide or twenty-three feet long and to every trailer (36 CFR § 4.21(b), Grand Teton compendium). About a mile and a half of the road is gravel; in 2026 the stretch between the Preserve and the Death Canyon junction stayed unpaved all summer while the park rebuilt Death Canyon Road, with delays of up to 45 minutes announced through Labor Day. The road closes to cars between the Death Canyon junction and the Granite Canyon trailhead from about the first of November to the first of May, and the park closes its northern section on short notice in September when bears are on the hawthorn berries beside the pavement. A citation north of the station is a federal violation notice, not a Wyoming ticket; the park speeding page explains what it costs, and the Grand Teton page explains what a resident has at stake in a federal case. Which side of the booth you were on decides the courthouse.

Two in the morning, by ordinance

The town's liquor code, not state law, sets the hour (Jackson Municipal Code § 6.40.030): the dispensing room closes at two and must be cleared by half past, every day; the Town Council can waive the hour on at most four days a year for a rodeo or a fair. The Jackson Police Department patrols the town around the clock, the sheriff's deputies and the Highway Patrol take the roads out of it, and the sheriff's DUI task force, formed in August 2025 with a WYDOT-administered grant, is funded to pay a deputy overtime for stops whose only purpose is DUI. The two roads out of downtown that go anywhere, Broadway west and U.S. 89 north, each carry a stepped-down limit within a few blocks of the Square. An officer still needs a reason to stop a car. But a taillight, a wide turn onto Cache, or 31 in a 25 at 2:20 in the morning is a reason. Whether the police wait outside the Cowboy Bar has a dull answer: they do not need to. The routes are few, and the routes are where the patrol is.

Getting home instead

The town's shuttle costs nothing to ride, runs every fifteen minutes until 7:45 in the evening and every twenty after that, and makes its last departure from Miller Park at 11:40 on the 2026 summer timetable. The town also runs an on-demand van through downtown and east Jackson from six in the morning to midnight, booked by app or by phone at 307-400-4438. The Teton Village bus costs three dollars; the last one leaves the Village at 11:20 and the last one leaves town for the Village at 10:20, on the summer schedule, and winter hours differ. All of that ends before the bars do: after midnight the choices are a cab, a sober driver, or a walk, and the Chamber's own page says rideshare apps are "still growing" here, which at two in the morning means not there. Wyoming does not run sobriety checkpoints. Its holiday DUI operations are saturation patrols, announced before they begin because the announcement is the deterrent. If you have read this far, consider yourself announced to.

What a Wyoming ticket costs

A speeding conviction for less than six over the posted limit, outside a school or construction zone and not in a commercial vehicle, is not entered on the department's record, and the fine is five dollars a mile, capped at twenty-five, with no court costs. Above that the statute sets a schedule: eleven to twenty over is $45 plus five dollars for each mile past ten, and more than twenty over is $95 plus five dollars for each mile past twenty, plus costs (W.S. § 31-5-1201(d)(vi)). A visiting driver's home state learns of a Wyoming conviction through the compact the DUI page describes and scores it under its own rules, which is why a Colorado or Utah driver sometimes cares more about a Teton County ticket than a Wyoming driver does. One more consequence is local and real: KHOL's May 2026 analysis of sheriff's records found that of 153 people the Teton County jail transferred to ICE or another agency in thirteen months, at least 113 had been booked on driving charges, DUI and driving without a license first among them. For a noncitizen, the stop is the whole case.