Signal Mountain

Signal Mountain got its name from a murder that was never proved. In 1891 Robert Ray Hamilton — a New York millionaire, heir to the Schermerhorn-Astor fortune, who'd come west to hunt — disappeared in Jackson Hole while traveling with his partner John D. Sargent. The search party made a pact: whoever found him would light a signal fire on the summit of the mountain that stands alone between Jackson Lake and the Snake River plain. Seven days later they found Hamilton's body drowned in the Snake two miles below the dam. The fire was lit. Sargent was suspected — he'd take Hamilton's effects and had told inconsistent stories — but nothing was ever proven, and the mountain kept the name of the fire that announced a drowning that might have been a murder.

The mountain itself is the valley's lookout — a glaciated knob rising nine hundred feet off the floor of Jackson Hole, the highest point in Grand Teton reachable by car. From the summit the whole basin reads at once: the Tetons running north to south like a wall, Jackson Lake dammed at their feet, the Snake bending south in a silver line. Five ranges are visible on a clear day — Tetons, Snake River, Gros Ventre, Absaroka, Yellowstone Plateau — the only place in the park where all of them fit in one view.

The lodge at its base is the oldest tourist operation in the park — a fishing camp from the 1920s bought by the Wort family in 1931, run with cabins they built and furniture they made, sold in 1940 for the money that built Jackson's Wort Hotel. The Harrises ran it for the next four decades and built what's there now.

Signal Mountain is the valley's witness post — the summit where the searchers' fire announced a body in the river, where the whole basin still reads like a map, and where the question of what happened to Robert Ray Hamilton in 1891 has never been answered.