Helena Hunters & Anglers Association member, Gayle Joslin (bio below), is being inducted into the Montana Outdoor Hall of Fame this year.
Congratulations Gayle!
Due to covid, the 2020 Montana Outdoor Hall of Fame will be held virtually, on Dec. 5th, 2020, beginning at 6:30 pm.
For more information & register for tickets, click here.
The full list of inductees are as follows:
- Stewart Monroe Brandborg
- Bruce Farling
- John & Carol Gibson
- George Bird Grinnell
- Hal Harper
- Dale Harris
- Gayle Joslin
- Bob Kiesling
- Paul Roos
- Gene Sentz
- Richard Vincent
- Vince Yannone
Gayle Joslin, the first woman hired as a Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks wildlife biologist, was respectfully named the “First Lady of Montana Wildlife Management” by the Women’s Outdoor Wire in 2009.
She is a 32-year FWP veteran and longtime wildlife biologist for the Helena Area.
As a young woman, Gayle acquired a love of the outdoors after becoming a cook at an outfitters camp where her father guided in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. She went on to earn a degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University, under often difficult circumstances in a heretofore male-dominated profession.
After college, when grizzly bears were about to be listed as a threatened species, she began working on a two-year-long grizzly bear project for the University of Montana on evaluating habitat and population dynamics.
In 1977 FWP hired Gayle to research the effects of dams, mining, and oil and gas development on mountain goats in the Cabinet Mountains of Northwest Montana to the Rocky Mountain Front on the east slope of the Continental Divide from the Sun River to Glacier Park. That area was later part of Lewis & Clark National Forest Supervisor Gloria Flora’s banned mineral leasing on a total of 356,000 acres along the Front.
Gayle also co-authored the first Wildlife Conservation Plan for the Bob Marshall Wilderness and authored Helena’s urban deer management plan.
For the Wildlife Society, she parlayed that seemingly disparate work to coordinate 35 other biologists’ efforts to look at the effects of recreation on Rocky Mountain wildlife.
The result is “Effects of Recreation on Rocky Mountain Wildlife: A Review for Montana,” a benchmark examination of how wildlife responds to impacts from all manner of recreation – from hikes to bikes and horses to All-Terrain Vehicles.
The report, co-authored with FWP colleague Heidi Youmans, earned the Montana Chapter of the Wildlife Society’s Communications Award in 2000, and the Touchstone Award presented by the Wildlife Management Institute in recognition of advanced science for wildlife management in North America.
Since leaving FWP, Gayle volunteers to evaluate impacts to wildlife from land, travel, and recreational management proposals, advocates for protecting wildlife security on public lands, and for maintaining wildlife linkage corridors on a landscape level.
Gayle’s influence is apparent in recent challenges to U.S. Forest Service proposals to weaken Rocky Mountain elk security standards based on tree cover, and decisions to readjust proposals that would harm wildlife habitats, like the now removed military training center proposed for the Continental Divide near Helena.
When faced with more and more development, Gayle told the Helena Independent Record in 2007, one’s only hope is that more will acquire “a strong appreciation and public awareness for wildlife, so people are willing to make sacrifices to maintain the integrity of our wildlands.”
Gayle is a founding board member of Helena Hunters and Anglers Association and Orion–The Hunter’s Institute.
Gayle lives in Helena. Her husband, Jim Posewitz (MOHOF 2018), passed in July 2020.
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