Salt Lake County official’s film, a daring Teton rescue

A documentary by Salt Lake County Councilmember showing at WIR chronicles three-day rescue in Grand Teton Park

Wyoming’s Teton Range has been a part of Jenny Wilson’s life since day one. Her parents named her after Jenny Lake, one of the pristine jewels of Grand Teton National Park.

As a child, Wilson, now a Salt Lake County, Utah council member, camped there with her family. Ted Wilson, her father and a former Salt Lake City mayor, was a Jenny Lake Ranger in the park as a young man.  It’s where the lake’s namesake first heard the stories of what would come to be known cinematically as The Grand Rescue.

Check out the trailer

• Click here to see the trailer for The Grand Rescue

Thanks to the Utah Association of Counties, the one-hour documentary will be screened at NACo’s Western Interstate Region (WIR) Conference on May 24, in the shadow of the Tetons in Jackson, Wyo. The next evening brings its broadcast premiere on public television in Salt Lake City.

The film recounts the story of two climbers who were stranded on the North Face of Grand Teton — one gravely injured with protruding compound leg fractures. From Aug. 22–24, 1967, seven rescuers, including Wilson’s dad, risked their lives during a harrowing rescue to save the climber and a female companion. It’s a rescue that would take about six hours with today’s technology, according to Ted Wilson.

“It was a very treacherous part of the mountain,” added his daughter. “It was an area that they didn’t know and didn’t know how they would rescue, because really no one had been there before.”

Jenny was two years old in 1967, but in the years since tales of the rescue would become the stuff of campfire lore during family visits to the park.

“We would inevitably end up around a campfire or we’d be out hiking and a storm would roll in” and they’d take shelter, she recalled. “The story returned to this rescue, and it really was a significant rescue in each of their careers. For many it was the rescue.”

Ted Wilson, who turns 77 this month, called it “a life-changing experience.”

Audacity is defined as a willingness to take big risks, and though Jenny Wilson had never made a documentary before, she approached it with a characteristic confidence and tenacity.

There’s very little that she’s set out to do that she hasn’t accomplished with distinction — from jobs at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute to volunteer director for the Salt Lake Winter Olympics to a congressman’s chief of staff in the early `90s to two-term County Council member.

“She’s not afraid of anything; she’ll take on any task;” her father said. “She has a rare ability to stay with something with enthusiasm.” A father would say that, but former colleagues of Wilson’s agree.

Jenny Wilson had never thought about making a film until a visit to the park seven years ago. “My husband and I were looking at this little display in 2009,” Wilson said. “It mentioned the rescue, and my husband turned to me and said, ‘This was a big deal.’  I said, ‘Yeah, this was a big deal.’ By the time we left the park that day we had this idea that it would be a movie.”

It would take four years to bring it fully to fruition.

“The story is really what prompted me to make the film,” she said. “I had had in my career a couple of different times working for Sundance, so I knew enough to be dangerous, but I didn’t know how to make a movie,” she quipped. As one of the film’s producers, she worked with more experienced partners and helped to raise about $300,000 from donors to fund the project. Filming began during a four-year break between Wilson’s first and current six-year terms on County Council.

She was motivated by a desire to bring the story to life for future generations before its guardians and their memorabilia slipped away.

“Each of us has something similar in our own family histories that our parents may have or an aunt or uncle may have or a grandparent,” Wilson said. “Maybe not anything as dramatic, maybe something more important….

“But sometimes they’re tucked away, and part of my objective was for all of the families of the rescuers to have the story told while these items and this legacy were at everyone’s fingertips and wasn’t tucked away. So I’ve achieved that.”

People who know Wilson aren’t surprised that she’s added filmmaker to her resume.  Joel Lawson is a D.C.-based public affairs consultant. He was press secretary to Rep. Bill Orton (D-Utah) when Wilson was hired to be his chief of staff.

“We had a lot of smart people with a lot of great ideas and things just weren’t clicking,” he recalled recently, “and then Jenny shows up and a lot of us don’t know what to make of her.

“We’d heard very good things about her, but we were a staff that was sort of at a loss for where we were going next. And she got on board, and she really made things operational. She really started to get trains on track and get them moving.”

Wilson came to Washington after her father’s unsuccessful bid for governor of Utah in 1988, just one of the many political campaigns she’s worked on throughout her youth and as an adult. He was expected to win but lost narrowly, Wilson said.

She had just graduated from the University of Utah, and at that point, thought she was done with politics.

Her first job was temporary. The agency placed her in a three-month assignment — at NACo — where she filled in for an administrative assistant who was on maternity leave. From there, she landed a full-time job at the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.

Over the next several years, she worked for Rep. Les AuCoin (D-Ore.) as assistant press secretary, returned to Utah and the Sundance Institute, got a master’s degree in public administration, came back to D.C. to work for Orton and returned to Utah after Orton lost a U.S. Senate race.

Her Washington experience convinced her that she wasn’t done with politics, after all. Once back in the Beehive State, she eventually became the first woman ever to win a seat on County Council and served 2005–2010. In 2007, she ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Salt Lake City. Wilson left elected office for a time and headed up institutional advancement for the University of Utah’s John A. Moran Eye Center. She ran for council again in 2013 and was elected to another six-year term.

If Lawson had his druthers, Wilson would be headed back to D.C. or across town in Salt Lake City to the State Capitol.

“My only question is how we figure out to get her to become governor or senator, and I’m quite serious about that,” he said, “because the state of politics as it is — it’s definitely rare to get someone of that quality to keep at it. She has incredible strength and resilience, and I would love for her to come back to Washington as a senator or for her to become governor out there.”

Wilson texted County News her reaction: “Please remind Joel that I’m a Democrat in Utah!”