AMK Ranch: Science in the Tetons

The AMK Ranch, tucked along the east shore of Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park, grew from an eighteen nineties homestead into a private family retreat in the nineteen thirties. Its initials stand for Alfred, Madeleine and Kenneth Berol, the family who bought it in the mid nineteen thirties, before the National Park Service eventually acquired it. Today the University of Wyoming and the National Park Service operate the compound together as a research center, making AMK one of the few working science facilities inside a national park.

Researchers based here study everything from trumpeter swan migration to elk winter range and the hydrology of the Snake River system. The historic log cabins and outbuildings of the original ranch remain in use, giving the station an unusual character: frontier architecture pressed into twenty-first-century ecological science in the shadow of the Cathedral Group of the Tetons.