LOCAL LIFE MY JACKSON HOLE LIFE
Rocky Vertone (aka DJ VerT-OnE)
// BY MAGGIE THEODORA
COURTESY PHOTO
Rocky Vertone DJs as DJ VerT-OnE.
HERE HE SHARES SOME HIGHLIGHTS
R
ocky Vertone didn’t even know where Jackson Hole was, but he knew he needed to head there after he graduated from the Art Institute of Philadelphia in 1991. “This was before the internet, and my buddy had a little Jackson Hole Ski Resort catalog,” he says. "I saw 4,139 vertical feet and a picture of the tram and was like, ‘Oh man, let’s go there.’” That October, Vertone, a native of New Jersey, packed up his Dodge Daytona and made the drive west. Somewhere in Kansas, his fifth gear blew out. “I drove from the middle of Kansas to Denver in fourth gear on I-70. It took half of the money I had saved to move to Jackson to fix my transmission,” he says. “That winter was just nuts,” he says of his first season in the valley. Although Vertone left at the end of that season, he was back the next winter and stayed until 1994. “A friend in Philly was opening a picture-framing shop and offered me a job,” Vertone says. “But I was always thinking about Jackson. This place, obviously everyone gets sucked in—that’s the story for so many people.” Vertone moved back in 1996 and hasn’t left since, getting married and becoming a father along the way.
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SUMMER 2021 | JACKSON HOLE
FROM HIS JACKSON HOLE LIFE.
HIS FIRST HOUSE “My first place was in the trailer park next to Calico. We arrived here at night, in the dark, so I didn’t really see anything but Hoback Canyon. Waking up on the Village Road, I was like, ‘Oh my God this is nuts.’ The Tetons—I had no idea. There were the photos in that catalog that got me out here, but walking out the front door and seeing these mountains, they looked impossible. I was coming from the East Coast and had never been out to Western mountains. We went right up to [Teton] Pass and skied there. That trailer park’s gone now, and it’s the Fireside Resort.”
