Three separate institutions are setting the terms for the Highway 89/191 corridor south of Jackson this week, each working from its own long-planned schedule. The Wyoming Department of Transportation is closing lanes in the Snake River Canyon. The Forest Service's concessionaires are pulling gear out of Granite Creek before the ground freezes. Wyoming Game and Fish's hunting calendar is flipping from bow season to rifle season. Each of these runs on its own clock, set months or years in advance, and this particular week is when all three happen to land on the same twenty-mile stretch of road.
If you live along this corridor, the effect is a version of the highway that behaves differently depending on what hour you're on it and what you're driving toward.
The Road Starts First
Beginning Monday, September 28, WYDOT and contract crews from H-K Contractors start milling and paving sections of US 89 in the Snake River Canyon, working at various points between mile marker 120 and mile marker 139 near Hoback Junction. Traffic control runs Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., with flaggers and pilot cars carrying vehicles through the work zones at reduced speed. WYDOT is telling drivers to expect delays of 10 to 20 minutes at a time, and Buckrail's coverage puts the job at roughly three weeks, which lands completion somewhere in mid-October.
This is not a repeat of the corridor's last major overhaul. The bigger Jackson South reconstruction project, which widened the highway, replaced the Snake River bridge near Hoback, and added a parallel pathway and wildlife crossings along the full eleven miles from Smith's to Hoback, wrapped up in late 2022 after running well past $70 million. What's happening this week is routine maintenance milling and paving on a surface that's had a few seasons to show wear, not another multi-year build.
The same Monday also marks the start of Town of Jackson street patching, with a separate set of downtown infrastructure projects beginning October 1 that will run through November before finishing in spring. WYDOT's fall paving pattern isn't unique to Hoback this year. It's the same seasonal window every year: work picks up once summer tourist volume drops and before snow shuts the window entirely.
The detail that matters most for anyone actually driving this corridor is the 8-to-4, weekday-only restriction. Early mornings, evenings, and weekends are untouched by pilot cars.
Granite Creek Runs on the Forest Service's Clock
While WYDOT is opening a construction window, the Forest Service and its concessionaires are closing one. Granite Creek Campground, up the gravel road off Highway 191 south of Hoback Junction, typically runs from the Thursday of Memorial Day weekend through late September, which means this week is close to its last for the year. Granite Hot Springs, at the end of that same road in the Gros Ventre Mountains, already shifted to its post-Labor Day hours of 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., trimmed back from the 10-to-7 summer schedule, and the pool itself is booked to run through October 31 before its winter closure.
Neither of these dates has anything to do with WYDOT's paving schedule. The campground and hot springs operate on a concessionaire's read of frost risk, staffing, and access-road conditions, which is why in some years the pool has closed early due to poor road conditions and other years it's run closer to its scheduled date. This year's closing window is proceeding on the calendar the Forest Service has published.
Further south in Hoback Canyon, Camp Creek Inn's restaurant and full bar service is also a summer-months operation, and its season winds down on much the same rough timeline as the campground and the pool.
Hunting Season Flips the Same Week
The third calendar belongs to Wyoming Game and Fish. Archery elk season, which runs statewide from September 1 through September 30, closes out this week. Rifle deer season opens October 1 and runs through October 14. General rifle elk season typically opens October 15 and runs through the end of the month. Specific hunt areas around Bondurant and the Hoback drainage follow this same general framework, with muzzleloader seasons overlapping in between.
The practical effect is that the character of vehicle traffic on Highway 191 south of Hoback Junction, and on the forest roads branching off it toward Bondurant, shifts from bow hunters in early-morning trucks to a heavier mix of rifle hunters, camp trailers, and out-of-state plates as October opens. This transition doesn't wait for construction to wrap or for Granite Hot Springs to close. It runs on Game and Fish's schedule, set well in advance and unrelated to either.
| Calendar | Governing body | What changes | Window |
|---|---|---|---|
| Highway construction | WYDOT / H-K Contractors | Single-lane, pilot-car delays, mile markers 120-139 | Sept. 28 through roughly mid-October, weekdays 8 a.m.-4 p.m. |
| Seasonal access | U.S. Forest Service | Granite Creek Campground closes for the year; Granite Hot Springs on shortened hours | Campground closes late Sept.; pool closes Oct. 31 |
| Hunting season | Wyoming Game and Fish | Archery elk closes, rifle deer opens, general rifle elk follows | Archery ends Sept. 30; deer Oct. 1-14; elk mid-to-late Oct. |
Where the Three Actually Collide
The overlap that matters isn't the dates themselves, it's the hours. WYDOT's traffic control only runs weekdays between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Hunters moving toward trailheads before dawn or returning after dark aren't affected by pilot cars at all. Someone driving to Granite Hot Springs on a weekday morning, when the pool opens at 10, will very likely sit through a flagger stop somewhere between mile marker 120 and 139. Someone making the same drive after 4 p.m., before the pool's 6 p.m. close, won't.
That means the corridor isn't uniformly slower this week. It's slower during a specific eight-hour weekday window and largely unaffected outside it, while the character of who else is on the road, rafters versus hunters versus commuters, is shifting on its own separate schedule entirely. A resident who only tracks one of these three calendars will read the corridor correctly for their own purposes and get surprised by one of the other two.
By the time the paving crews finish in mid-October, Granite Hot Springs will be within a couple of weeks of its own October 31 close, and general rifle elk season will just be getting underway. The three clocks that overlapped this week don't stay overlapped. They reset on their own separate schedules, and by November the corridor runs on a single rhythm again, the winter one, when Granite Creek Road closes to wheeled vehicles and the only way to the springs is by snowmobile, dog sled, or ski.
If you're weighing a property along this corridor and want a clearer read on how its seasonal access and traffic patterns actually work before you commit to a piece of it, Tom Evans Real Estate offers a Request a Confidential Consultation.
