Pinedale Is Filling In Its Own Blank Spaces This Fall

Drive west on Pine Street this month and you'll pass scaffolding on the old locker plant near the highway split, plywood staged behind Ridley's on the east end of downtown, and cleared ground at the Museum of the Mountain Man where a fort is going up in sections. Three sites, three different owners, none of them related on paper. Look at what each one is actually doing to the land underneath it, though, and a single pattern shows up. Nobody is building on open ground at the edge of town this year. Everybody is building up, behind, or inside a lot that already had something on it.

That's the actual story of Pinedale's construction season, not three unconnected permits but one visible answer to the same question: when a small town with a fixed downtown decides to grow, where does the extra square footage come from?

The Grocery Store Growing Into Its Own Backyard

Ridley's Family Market, the county's largest grocery store, is planning an expansion into an undeveloped plot behind the Dollar General and Fish and Game buildings, with two separate plots reportedly part of the project. That backyard has been sitting empty for years while the store in front of it kept adding customers.

Ridley's has occupied that spot on East Pine Street since January 2008, when Mark and Jerry Ridley, a father and son running stores out of Jerome, Idaho, bought the building from longtime owner Jud Faler and turned Faler's General Store into the first Wyoming location for what's now a regional grocery chain. Almost two decades later, the store has kept growing by rearranging what was already inside its own walls before touching anything outside them. In 2024, renovations reshaped the Outfitter Liquor section of the building to make room for a planned Arctic Circle counter, which would have been Pinedale's first fast food location. That project shrank the liquor store's footprint by roughly a quarter to carve out the new space, all inside the existing four walls.

This year's move is a different kind of expansion. Instead of subdividing space it already owns, Ridley's is finally building into land it's held next to Dollar General and the Fish and Game office for years. Same lot, same neighbors, more square footage without a new address.

A Second Story Where There Wasn't One

Farther down Pine Street, at 618 W. Pine St., the town council approved a commercial building permit for an extensive remodel of the former locker plant. Developer Casey Fairbanks presented plans to add a second story and convert the roughly 9,000-square-foot building into three separate retail rental units, with an Old West-style facade tying the whole thing together. The approval is contingent on a final review by the Wyoming State Fire Marshal, and the goal is to have the exterior finished by the end of fall.

Pine Street doubles as Highway 191 through this stretch of town, so every car passing through Pinedale on the main route drives past this building's frontage. A single-story cold storage building is becoming a two-story retail block without moving a single property line. The lot stays exactly the size it was. The building on it just gets taller.

A Fort Instead of a Wing

The largest of the three projects sits on the Museum of the Mountain Man's own grounds. The museum broke ground on October 18, 2025, on Fort Sublette, an 1830s-style fort named for fur trader William Sublette. It's funded by a $450,000 donation from the Gooch family, Rusty, Rosemary, Lindsey, and Wes, along with a $225,000 matching grant from Sublette County, and it marks the first phase of what the museum calls its Bicentennial Expansion, a multi-decade plan running from 2025 to 2040 that aims to triple the facility's total space and eventually add a gallery for painter Alfred Jacob Miller alongside expanded interpretation of Plains Indian history.

The construction sequence explains why the site looks the way it does this fall. Dirt work to prepare the ground finished in fall 2025. Over the winter, the fort's cabins and blockhouses were built off site, then moved into place at the fort grounds through spring and summer 2026. By the time this year's museum season winds down, the individual buildings that make up Fort Sublette should already be standing on ground that was bare a year earlier.

The living history plan for the site is specific: a trade room, a blacksmith shop, a fur press and fur room, living quarters and a Booshway house, a tailor shop, a corral and tack room, with demonstrations of beaver trapping and processing led by the American Mountain Men, a group that's already run interpretation at the museum's Rendezvous and Living History Days events for 25 years.

"The Gooch Family believes the Museum of the Mountain Man is an incredible asset to our community," Rusty Gooch said of the gift that funded the fort's first phase.

Like the other two projects, this one isn't new construction reaching outward from town. It's an addition built inside a footprint the museum already controlled, funded specifically to grow what already existed rather than start something new somewhere else.

Same Blocks, More Room

A regional grocery chain, an independent developer, and a nonprofit historical society arrived at the same answer this year without coordinating with each other. Ridley's is filling in the empty lot it already owned. Casey Fairbanks is adding a floor to a building that already stood. The Museum of the Mountain Man is building forward from ground it already held, funded by donors who wanted to grow the institution rather than start a new one across town.

The pattern shows up elsewhere in town business this year too. The town council's first reading of Ordinance 741 rezones land next to Sublette County Hospital from residential to commercial, specifically to let the hospital district add administrative offices or private clinics on ground adjacent to the building it already operates, with an existing irrigation ditch and a buffer of willow trees preserved and a shared parking arrangement built in to avoid adding traffic to the surrounding streets. Even a hospital expansion is going next door to itself rather than out to a new site.

None of this required new roads, new subdivisions, or new land coming into play along the highway. It required three groups deciding that the fastest way to get more room in Pinedale was to make better use of the room they already had.

By the time the museum closes for the season and the locker plant's new facade is finished, Pine Street will look measurably different than it did in the spring, and every square foot of that change will sit on ground the town had already built on once before.

Growth on this scale is easy to miss if you're only watching for new subdivisions. Julie Kannier and the RE/MAX Elite team keep track of these smaller, quieter projects because they shape what Pinedale actually looks like block by block. If you're curious about what any of this means for a specific property nearby, get in touch.