Leek's Lodge: The Guide Who Stayed

Stephen Leek came to Jackson Hole in the eighteen eighties as a hunting guide and photographer and never left. He built a lodge on Jackson Lake, one of the few private tourist facilities on the lake at the time. Leek is best remembered for his photographs of starving elk in the brutal winters of that era, images he used in a national lecture tour that persuaded Congress to fund the National Elk Refuge south of Jackson in nineteen twelve.

His photographs may have saved the Jackson Hole elk herd from extinction. The lodge he built later became part of the Grand Teton National Park, which absorbed the private inholdings along the lake over the following decades. Today the site is managed by the Park Service.