Grand Teton National Park

When Congress created Grand Teton National Park in 1929, it protected only the jagged peaks themselves — not the valley floor beneath them, because local ranchers in Jackson Hole wanted no part of a park that might restrict grazing or bring federal control over their land. John D. Rockefeller Jr., who had fallen for the valley on a camping trip in 1926, responded by quietly buying up more than 33,000 acres of private ranchland through a shell company called the Snake River Land Company, without disclosing his identity to the sellers, intending eventually to donate it all to the government.

Word of Rockefeller's identity leaked out by the early 1930s, and Wyoming ranchers and politicians, furious at being bought out by a Northeastern magnate without knowing it, spent the better part of two decades blocking any expansion of the park into the valley. Rockefeller eventually threatened to sell the land on the open market if Congress refused to accept it, and in 1950 Congress finally merged his donated valley floor with the original 1929 mountain park, creating the roughly 310,000-acre Grand Teton National Park that exists today — one of the longest and most contentious land fights in National Park Service history.

The result is a park built around one of the most photographed mountain skylines in America: the Teton Range rises more than 7,000 feet straight up from the valley floor with no foothills to soften the ascent, a product of the same fault-block geology that keeps dropping Jackson Hole lower while the peaks rise. Moose, elk, and grizzly bears still move freely across the boundary Rockefeller spent two decades trying to erase.