Many of us have gotten accustomed to watching the television series “Yellowstone” in recent years.  While that series takes place in Montana, a county in Wyoming that borders Idaho and Montana contains 40% of Yellowstone National Park’s total area.  Teton County of Wyoming, also “had the highest average incomes per capita of any county in the United States, at $252,000″ in 2019 according to this listing from Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia article also makes these comments:

• “As of the fourth quarter of 2021, the median home price in Teton County was $1,060,093, an increase of 17.8% from the prior year.”
• “It is estimated that as of 2023 Teton County had a population of 23,232”

The City of Jackson and the Jackson Hole ski area are both within the confines of Teton County. . . a county that one would have to describe as “remote”.

It’s with that background that I recently read this article from the Jackson Hole News & Guide titled “Funeral home fights for its life“.  The article deals with Jackson’s only mortuary and their apparent struggles with profitability.

Related — Here is the website for Grand Teton Funeral Home and Cremation of Jackson, Wyoming.

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

Funeral Director Daily take:  Funeral Director Daily has authored similar stories of issues for funeral homes in remote locations.  For instance, here is a story of similar issues from the Prince Rupert, British Columbia, Canada, geographic area.  We’ve also done stories of funeral homes exiting high-priced urban areas, such as San Francisco, because of the cost of real estate.  In those cases, however, there are suburban funeral homes within a short distance to pick up the business.

In the cases of Prince Rupert and Teton County funeral home help is probably at least one hour away.  And, that causes a problem when town folk have a death in the family.

You can read the article on the Jackson funeral home and its issues.  However, one thing I wonder about is the idea of numbers of deaths in Teton County.  From this graph you can see that the United States had about 8.5 deaths per 1,000 population prior to the pandemic in 2019.  Teton County, with a population of 23,000 should see a total number of deaths, according to that statistic, of about 195 annually.  Yet if you take a look at the funeral home’s website and its current obituaries you will notice only 3 obituaries for the first two months of 2025.

While I have no answers one has to wonder if there is more to the story?  Is the population of Teton County very young? . . . .Does the wealthy citizen population have 2nd homes in areas that they move to when their health is failing?

In any regards I found this an interesting story and an issue those of us in more urban geographic areas don’t even know exists among our colleagues.

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