Naming of Grand Teton Drive remains obscured in city records

It’s clear that Grand Teton Drive was part of the plan.

The street, bookended by Horse Drive, Iron Mountain Road, Log Cabin Way and Moccasin Road to the north, with Farm Road, Elkhorn Road and Deer Springs Way to the south, makes a snug fit for city of Las Vegas planners’ alphabetically named street grid north of Interstate 215.

But it’s hard to say who named the G -themed stretch of asphalt between Farm Road and Horse Drive.

“We know master-planned streets in the northwest follow the alphabetical order for every half-mile of spacing,” city spokesman Jace Radke said. “We know it goes back long ago, but it’s hard to say what it was named after.”

Grand Teton isn’t unique in that respect. Many of the city’s streets are named by developers and frequently buried in hundreds of pages of requests rubber-stamped by the City Council and digitally or hand-archived by the city clerk, according to Radke.

Those records are hard to find without a dedication date and even harder to recall in a city with an institutional memory clouded by two generations of significant growth.

“We asked ( director of operations and maintenance) Larry Haugness, who’s been here 26 years, and he doesn’t remember (when it was dedicated),” Radke said. “So we’re striking out at this point.”

Former Clark County design engineer Ed Andrews moved from Arkansas to the Las Vegas Valley in 1980.

Andrews remembers when road names were left to himself and other civil engineers laying the groundwork for development. He couldn’t claim credit for Grand Teton Drive.

“Some — few, actually, as I remember — developers care about the street names and leave it up to the civil engineer to come up with them,” Andrews said. “At VTN and later at Delta Engineering, where I was involved with the Spanish Trail development, we kept the phone books from (Los Angeles), San Diego and any other large city where somebody might have a contact.

“We would mine street names from these directories as well as using names of loved ones, friends (and) relatives.”

Dennis Dinzeo finds it hard to believe that a nine-mile-long arterial, which starts west of U.S. Highway 95 and runs east to North Las Vegas, could go undocumented in the city archives.

The 59-year-old U.S. marshal, a frequent mountain biker in the hills above northwest Las Vegas, said unpaved portions of the road pick up west of where city-maintained blacktop ends on Shaumber Road, part of a trail he suspects could have served as a precursor to Kyle Canyon Road, today’s primary access route to Mount Charleston.

Grand Teton’s story seems lost for now, but Dinzeo bets there is plenty to find.

“The paved portion of Grand Teton ends just about at the (Kyle Canyon) detention basin,” he said. “But the unpaved portion picks up just north of Kyle Canyon Road, and there’s fragments of old road — fragments like I’ve seen from the 1930s through early 1960s — and it occurred to me that maybe it ran all the way to Kyle Canyon.”

The acres of dusty sagebrush and ex-urban development dotted around Grand Teton Drive do not necessarily call to mind northwestern Wyoming, home to the famed peak and national park that shares the road’s name.

That doesn’t rule out the possibility that some unheralded surveyor, civil engineer or land developer found inspiration for the road’s name jutting up from the western horizon.

“(Grand Teton Drive) points right at Mount Charleston,” Dinzeo said, “so maybe they were inspired to name it after the Grand Tetons.”

Contact Centennial and North Las Vegas View reporter James DeHaven at jdehaven@viewnews.com or 702-477-3839.