WLM | places
By June Johnston
Images provided by the Funk Brothers
Alpine, Wyoming – Soaring
“L
ittle Switzerland,” otherwise known as
Alpine, Wyoming, rests at the northern
tip of a stretch of land fourteen miles wide
and roughly fifty miles long. It is an area whose beauty
would be hard to surpass and lives up to its original
description of being the star of all valleys. Surrounded
by Bridger-Teton, Caribou, and Targhee National
Forests, and home to Palisades Reservoir where the
Greys, Snake, and Salt Rivers converge, it is about
twenty-eight miles south of Jackson, Wyoming.
Due to its abundant game for their food supply, the
Shoshone tribe were the area’s main inhabitants until
the early 1800s. Between the 1840-60s, explorers,
trappers, and immigrants began finding their way west.
They traveled through the area via the Lander cutoff, coming out south of what later became known as
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Wyoming Lifestyle Magazine | Late Summer/Fall 2016
Smoot, Wyoming. In the 1870s, Morman Apostle Moses
Thatcher and Brigham Young Jr. chose the area for
settlement. With extreme amounts of snow in the winter
(an average of 500 inches per year), it was not an easy
place to settle.
Some of the earliest settlers in Alpine included Walt
Pein and Jim Jorden, who homesteaded in 1907. The
determined residents eventually brought electricity to
the area by 1938 and the Internet in 1995. An amazing
number of entrepreneurs established businesses in Star
Valley through the years, one of the most prominent
being CallAir in Afton, Wyoming. Reuel Call started the
endeavor in 1939 and against all odds, with many twists
and turns, it survived and provided many fine aircraft
as well as employment. CallAir still exists under the
ownership of Stu Horn. The plant is now Aviat, and is