Cowboy real estate: Historic Wyoming dude ranch hits market for $58M

Real estate has an abundance of swaggering mavericks and cowboy personas, but this sprawling Wyoming property is for the real thing. 

The Gros Ventre River Ranch, rebranded as the Grand View River Ranch, just hit the market for $58 million. Spanning almost 119 acres in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, the ranch has a storied past along with its hiking trails, pastures, and two-dozen buildings, according to its website. 

David NeVille and Shawn Asbell, agents with Neville Asbell Real Estate, an affiliate of Keller Williams Jackson Hole, have the listing. 

The story of the ranch’s ownership reads like true American West Mythology. Its first owners held out from selling to John D. Rockefeller when he was on his 35,000-acre Teton shopping spree in the early 20th century. The ranch changed hands two times before a local cowboy named Claude Wham won it in a game of cards in 1944. 

He sold it 15 years later to his employers, local brothers Roy and Reese Chambers, and they started operating it as a dude ranch, according to the ranch’s website. In 1986, Karl and Tina Weber bought Gros Ventre from the Chambers for an undisclosed amount. 

Karl Weber, an inventor and founder of Uniweb and Aerochem, and his wife, Tina, had already become partners in Lost Creek Ranch, another dude ranch near Jackson Hole. They continued to build out the dude ranch facilities at Gros Ventre, adding guest lodges, a barn and an owner’s home. 

Weber died in 2016 while spending the spring in his Laguna Beach home, his obituary shows. Now, both of his dude ranches are for sale.

Earlier this summer, Lost Creek Ranch, which the Webers owned with the late real estate titan Gerald T.  Halpin and his wife, Helen Halpin, also hit the market. Washington Business Journal reported the dude ranch has found a buyer, two months after hitting the market for $40 million.

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