Bill Hayes grew up in Houston and he and his wife Mary were first introduced to Jackson Hole in the
mid-1990s by a good friend who has a second home here. It took another 20 years and record heat in
Texas for them to return to this valley and build a second home in 2014. Never wanting to leave Jackson
Hole they moved permanently to Wilson in the summer of 2018.Bill spent the last 40 years as an oil and gas lawyer, the majority of which was spent in the international
energy industry in transactional work from Bolivia to Bangladesh. This included moving the family to
Cairo and later, living in London and Dallas with Mary. In his last position with a public oil and gas
company focused on West Africa, after stepping aside as General Counsel, Bill managed and later
consulted on the company’s environmental and social development initiatives in Morocco, Ghana,
Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, to name a few. He and others in the company worked with various
governments to provide materials and other forms of assistance to fishing villages, a women’s seaweed
farming co-op, education, public hygiene, potable water development and agricultural enhancement.
Bill semi-retired in 2020. Since then, he has been active in Jackson Hole with the wildlife safety on
Highway 390 and as a member of The Nature Conservancy’s JH Advisory Board.
Bill is involved in land and water preservation and conservation in Texas where he is a trustee of The
Nature Conservancy in Texas. Mary is a trustee of The Nature Conservancy in Wyoming. They are
exhilarated by the majesty of the open spaces teeming with wildlife in Jackson Hole and the surrounding
areas. Yet, the long term survival of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is an issue that requires urgent
attention and, importantly, Jackson Hole is an integral piece of this unparalleled system.
