Controlled Slide, Uncontrolled Mess: Teton Pass Buried Behind a 30-Foot Snow Wall

With input from Cowboy State Daily, Powder, and Jackson Hole News&Guide.

Teton Pass didn’t just get a little dicey Monday — it got flat-out erased.

Wyoming Highway 22 was shut down all day after WYDOT crews intentionally triggered an avalanche that dropped a wet, heavy wall of snow about 30 feet tall and roughly 500 feet long across the road. The closure started around 3 a.m., and by 3:45 a.m. the slide had swallowed more than 500 feet of pavement. Crews spent the next 14 hours grinding through the mess with bulldozers before they could reopen the route. And even after traffic started moving again, work was set to continue Tuesday.

“It was a good thing we did it when we did,” said John Eddins, an engineer for WYDOT District 3.

If they hadn’t pulled the trigger early, he said, the avalanche could’ve hit the pass during the morning commute.

The slide came out of Glory Bowl, a big avalanche path on the southeast side of Mount Glory. WYDOT made the call because the snowpack was getting sketchy — the kind of mix that makes avalanche forecasters lose sleep: heavy snowfall, plus wind, plus rain, plus warmer temps.

“When we see that the risk of an avalanche is high, we will close the road and cause the avalanche to come down,” Eddins said.

Instead of traditional explosives, WYDOT used Gazex exploders, which trigger avalanches using propane and oxygen — essentially controlled blasts designed to drop unstable snow before it drops itself.

Normally, WYDOT can rely on big snowblowers to carve open the pass. This time? Not happening.

The snow was so wet and dense that Eddins said their usual LaRue snowblowers wouldn’t have done much besides churn and complain. So WYDOT went old-school heavy equipment: dozers and loaders, pushing and hauling the snow out piece by piece.

Avalanche tech Don Lawless called it the biggest slide he’d ever seen in that spot.

“We were not expecting the amount of snow we saw come down Glory Bowl,” he said. “It was the largest avalanche I’ve seen here.”

The slide scraped parts of the mountainside down to bare soil, dumping a massive pile right onto the highway.

WYDOT didn’t tackle the pile alone. They got help from:

• Yellow Iron, a local excavation company that brought in a bulldozer;
• The Idaho Transportation Department, which attacked the debris from the west side.

“We are very lucky to have such exceptional neighbors to the west,” said Troy Jerup, WYDOT District 3 maintenance foreman. “Without them, we would have not been able to open this road as quickly as we did.”

Forcing avalanches in winter isn’t unusual on Teton Pass. WYDOT routinely triggers slides in the area — including Hoback Canyon — to keep the road from becoming a roulette wheel for commuters.

“This is a pretty standard operating procedure,” Eddins said, though he admitted the volume of snow made this one a little different.

And despite the size of the avalanche, WYDOT isn’t expecting major damage to the road itself. Eddins said it’s not like the 2024 landslide situation — avalanches usually don’t wreck the pavement unless conditions are extreme. Worst case, he said, maybe some guardrail damage.

All of this is happening as avalanche danger around the Tetons remains high, with unstable storm snow and wind loading creating “red flag” conditions. WYDOT’s slide was about protecting the highway — but it also underscores the bigger message: the snowpack is touchy, and winter hasn’t been playing nice.

Bottom line: Monday’s closure was inconvenient, sure — but it was also a reminder of how quickly Teton Pass can go from “normal commute” to “completely buried,” especially when the snow turns heavy and the weather flips weird.