The Newest Landmark North of Town Doesn't Require a Museum Ticket

How do you build a monument to a bear who spent two decades teaching an entire valley to slow down?

That question sat unanswered for nearly two years after Grizzly 399, the roadside matriarch known across the Tetons as the Queen of the Tetons, was struck and killed on U.S. Highway 26 in Snake River Canyon in October 2024. On September 9 this year, the National Museum of Wildlife Art answered it. At 5 p.m., in front of a crowd that filled the entrance plaza, sculptor Jocelyn Russell's bronze "Against All Odds" was unveiled and permanently installed near the museum's front doors. If you live north of town, the piece everyone's been talking about is probably closer than you think, and reaching it doesn't mean walking past a ticket counter.

The piece is outside the gate, not inside it

Adult admission to the museum's fourteen indoor galleries runs $18, with a discounted rate for seniors and kids. That's the number people picture when they think about visiting. But the sculpture drawing crowds this month isn't in a gallery. It's on the Sculpture Trail, the three-quarter-mile path that winds along the sage-covered bluff overlooking the National Elk Refuge, and the trail has been free and open to the public since it opened in 2011.

The location matters for anyone who already lives in this corridor. The museum sits on East Gros Ventre Butte, about two and a half miles north of Town Square, directly across the highway from the Elk Refuge. The trail connects to the main bike pathway running into Jackson from the north and south through an underpass, so it's genuinely reachable on foot or bike without ever pulling into the museum's parking lot or paying a dime. For a resident out for a morning walk or an evening ride, "Against All Odds" isn't a special-occasion outing. It's a stop along a path you might already use.

A trail that rarely gets a new neighbor

Part of what makes this addition worth noticing is how rarely the trail changes. Walter Hood, the landscape architect who designed it, laid out a three-quarter-mile loop meant to eventually hold around thirty pieces. When it formally opened in fall 2011, about twenty were in place, following a monumental bronze elk grouping called Wapiti Trail that sculptor Bart Walter had dedicated back in September 2007. A bison sculpture honoring two local mountaineers joined the trail in 2016. That's roughly the pace: a headline piece added only occasionally, not something that shows up on a quarterly events calendar.

"Against All Odds" breaks that pattern in a specific way. Russell told Cowboy State Daily that the museum's entrance held only three monument positions, and two were already filled. The third had been open since the museum's current building went up in 1994. Thirty-two years later, that spot finally has an occupant, and it's the one animal most associated with this valley's relationship to its own wildlife.

The person who actually made her

Russell has sculpted more than sixty public monuments, including a bronze of Secretariat and a war-horse memorial called Sgt. Reckless. She and fellow sculptor Kristen Douglas-Seitz had watched 399 in the wild back in 2020, the year the bear emerged with her famous four cubs. The sculpture grew larger than first planned, ultimately life-and-three-quarters scale rather than the life-and-a-half originally announced, because Russell has found that animals sculpted at true size can look small once they're standing outdoors against real mountains.

That date also kicked off this year's Jackson Hole Fall Arts Festival. Wildlife photographer Tom Mangelsen, whose images of the bear circulated worldwide and helped make her a household name well beyond Wyoming, stood beside Russell at the dedication. According to Local News 8, Russell said of the bear she'd once watched navigate the canyons with her cubs in tow, "She was an amazing mother."

The free day locals actually use

If you want to see the rest of the museum, not just the trail, there's a mechanism worth knowing about. On the first Sunday of every month, year-round, admission to the full museum is free for area residents, a program called First Sundays that runs on sponsorship from Bank of Jackson Hole. During the colder months, that Sunday often comes with added family programming tied to whatever exhibition is up. The rest of the year, regular hours run daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. between May and October, shifting to Tuesday through Sunday in the off-season.

None of that is required to see "Against All Odds." The trail itself sits outside those hours and outside that gate entirely, open whenever the grounds are, at no cost, to anyone who walks or rides up from the pathway below.

What this actually changes for the corridor

The practical shift here isn't dramatic. Nobody's property value moves because of a bronze bear. But the character of daily life along this stretch north of town just picked up a genuine landmark, one with a real story behind it and a permanent home that wasn't available before this year. For residents who already treat the Elk Refuge overlook and the museum's bluff as part of their regular walking or biking route, there's now a specific destination worth building a loop around, and a reason to stop rather than pass by.

The Grizzly 399 Legacy of Love Project, the nonprofit effort behind the sculpture, is still accepting donations to cover the final costs of casting and installing the piece at 399monument.com. Whether or not you contribute, the bronze is already standing on the bluff, free to visit, on a trail that connects straight back to your own street.

If you're already planning a fall walk toward the Refuge, this is the season to take it. And if you're curious what else is shifting in this stretch of the valley, from pathway access to the pace of new construction north of town, Meredith Landino keeps a close eye on both the market and the community around it. Let's Connect.