The major gateway to Grand Teton National Park is the famously beautiful and beautiful-peopled town of Jackson, along with its neighbors Teton Village—popular among skiers and snowboarders from all over the world as the home of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort—and the small, unincorporated community of Wilson. These three communities form a triangle surrounded by greater Jackson Hole, with Teton Village at the northern tip and sharing a border with the south end of the national park, and Jackson and Wilson forming the two southern points. For a small town, Jackson has an extensive array of hotels and inns, restaurants and bars, and galleries and shops. Steadily growing Wilson has a handful of additional options, while Teton Village has hundreds of hotel rooms and condos, plus several restaurants, but it's really a self-contained resort community that while close to the park doesn't have the inviting small-town character that you'll find in Jackson.
What all three of these communities share is a high cost of living and visiting—hotel rates, in particular, can be very high during winter's peak ski season and also quite high in summer and—increasingly—right through October.
If you're willing to stay an hour or more from Grand Teton's southern entrance, there are some smaller towns on the region's outskirts that offer more wallet-friendly lodging options, if fewer restaurants and attractions. On the "back side of the Tetons," as eastern Idaho is known, easygoing and rural Driggs is the western gateway to Grand Teton—it's about an hour's drive from Moose—and Yellowstone. Dubois, about 85 miles east of Jackson, has a smattering of hotel options, and you can usually still get a room for the night here during the peak summer travel period without making a reservation weeks or months in advance. About an hour south of Jackson, Pinedale is another small Wyoming town with a handful of lodging options, restaurants, and attractions.
