A New Era at the Grand Targhee Bike Park: Trails Manager Kevin Frazier has big dreams for the Wyoming resort's MTB future.

Alta, Wyoming, is a unique and slightly unlikely place: nestled on the west side of the Teton Mountain Range, there’s no way to get to it from the rest of Teton County, Wyoming, in which it resides, but through a solid stretch of its neighboring state of Idaho. Residents of this census-designated hamlet mostly conduct business in Driggs and Victor, Idaho, and share things with both towns like emergency response teams and schools. For government services, Alta residents must drive almost forty miles, including up and over a significant mountain pass, to Jackson, Wyoming. Many locals lovingly refer to the area, therefore, as "Wydaho."

Just past this stranded little cluster of Wyoming residents, the road dead-ends at the entrance to Grand Targhee Resort, another somewhat quirky island of physically-Wyoming, logistically-Idaho, and culturally-Wydaho soil. With notably more mom-and-pop vibes and generally mellower terrain than neighboring industry behemoth Jackson Hole Mountain Resort (JHMR), Targhee doesn't always get the same sort of international acclaim as its glossy Tetons counterpart, and is often a bit of an afterthought for folks planning vacations to the area.

But thanks in large part to that lower-key attitude and lesser-grade slopes, the ‘Ghee, as it is familiarly known, feels in many ways like it's one step ahead of JHMR when it comes to mountain biking. From its unpretentious cross-country trails, to its welcoming uphill policy, to lift-access riding that offers everything from double-black steeps to green flow, Targhee has demonstrated a commitment to its in-bounds biking infrastructure. And in 2024, they reaffirmed that commitment by hiring a new Trails Manager, Kevin Frazier, to move the bike park forward into its next era.

Frazier is a career trail worker with a calloused-hands-on approach to both digging and riding. He grew up in the Aspen, Colorado, region, which is where he first got into mountain biking and trail work. “The guy who ran my first crew happened to be my hockey coach,” Frazier recalls. “I ran into him while I was backpacking with my parents, and he was like ‘I got a spot open this summer; just put your application in.’”

From that point on, Frazier found himself gravitating to trail crews - front country, wilderness, you name it - each summer during high school and college and beyond. “I just loved hanging out in the woods and making trails better than they were,” Frazier says. So much so that in 2018, he took a job with the United States Forest Service (USFS) in the Teton Valley, Idaho, area, first as a snow ranger patrolling wilderness boundaries by snowmobile, then as a Trail Crew Lead and, eventually, as Trails Coordinator.

When asked about his relocation, Frazier laughs. “I’m one of the rare people who moved to this region for Victor. I didn’t ever live in Jackson Hole; I just always knew that I liked how quiet it is on this side. The vibe is a little better.” Frazier settled in quickly, and found himself connecting immediately to his work, projects that ranged from rehabbing old trails to creating brand new ones. “I hopped right in.”

This summer, though, “Fed Kev” changed things up by accepting a position as Trails Manger at Grand Targhee Resort. “The allure of working in the private sector was pretty enticing,” he admits. “There’s a lot more freedom and fewer hoops to jump through, which lets us get trails built faster and in a more user-specific way.”

Somewhat ironically, that freedom to build that Frazier now enjoys is thanks to, and reliant on, a special use permit from none other than his old employer, the USFS; Targhee resort sits on land managed by the Caribou-Targhee National Forest, a vast three million acre swath of public land stretching down to both Idaho and Wyoming from Montana.

“It allows us to run the ski area in the winter and the bike park in the summer,” Frazier explains about the permit. “And it allows us to build and maintain bike-specific trails, up to a certain amount of mileage, to whatever standard we want, which is pretty cool.” Frazier adds that Targhee is also currently working to expand their allowable mileage by about twenty miles, which would be “pretty significant,” he says with cautious optimism.

Significant, because it would let Frazier and his team both protect existing trail and improve the overall connectivity of the bike park, which is expansive: beyond their gravity options, Targhee also offers a impressive amount of resort-maintained cross-country riding that is free for the general public to use. "Which is actually a really cool thing, and kind of rare, for a resort like this to do."

Additional trail miles, Frazier explains, would allow him to honor the work of builders who came before him by protecting those already-established assets, while still being able to do a bit of rearranging to improve flow and to add in things like access to areas of the mountain that currently lack it.

Which is not to say that Frazier and his team don't already have plenty to do with the miles they already have permitted. “Right now, we’re up to our eyeballs in rebuilding upper Bullwinkle," he says, naming a popular run at the bike park that he says they're completely rebuilding into a blue gravity flow trail. "We’re hoping to finish by the time the snow starts flying. We’re also putting in a ‘dark blue’ jump line over in the Shoshone lift area, where you can learn the basic fundamentals of getting your tires off the ground.”

As Frazier lists off projects, he seems energized rather than overwhelmed: “Things are looking phenomenal right now!” Frazier credits his team at Targhee for the success he’s feeling. “We’re pretty lucky up here. We have two machine builders, Harlan and Cody, and then eleven or twelve hand crew workers as well, so we’ve got a lot of hands. I’m super grateful for the crew - they’re really passionate about mountain biking and about the work that they complete, and really take pride in the work they’re doing on the hill.”

Work that certainly comes with challenges. Like most of the Teton Range, winter can be slow to leave the 'Ghee in spring and early to arrive again come fall, which make the build season incredibly short. Targhee is also rocky - very rocky - and typically sees pretty dry summers, which limits the amount of rain that falls that the crew can use to keep trails in good shape, which is further compounded by the fact that what little dirt they do have comes with a relatively low clay content. Which, as Frazier puts it, “makes it harder to build large features that are going to stand the test of time.”

To address this, Frazier and his team do a lot of schlepping of both water and soil. “We don’t have water access at the summit of Fred’s Mountain, which the Dream Catcher lift goes up, so we transport water for patch jobs in side-by-sides and ATVs, and we have a five hundred gallon water trailer we can transport places if needed. And then with dirt, I’m always interested in seeing what works. Right now, we’ve got a big old pile in the base that has a little better clay content in it that we’ve been using quite a bit to get in small loads to different project sites. Problem is, it can be hard to get a big dump truck to the exact location we need.”

Frazier says that, to some degree, working with what he’s got is part of what he loves about Targhee. “We’ve got everything from really easy green trails at the bottom, to really raw, rocky, ‘old-school’ style descents up top, which I do think is amazing.” Which is why, no matter what new and improved offerings the future might hold, he’s committed to “making sure what we have to start out with is always riding good.”

“For me, my big goal is to keep Targhee on the map,” Frazier sums up, an understandable statement coming from his slightly-backwater Wydaho position. “I know a lot of people come to the Rocky Mountain region and hit Big Sky, hit the Pass, hit the Village… hit Targhee as well! We’re passionate about our trails here, and we’re just going to keep making them better, and expanding as we’re allowed to, and keeping the vibes high.”