Jack Lyon, left, accepts congratulations from his longtime friend and fellow scientist, RMEF board member Jim Peek. RMEF President J. Dart, center, holds the Olaus J. Murie Award.

Olaus J. Murie wore many hats in his lifetime: explorer, scientist, writer, artist, philosopher, champion of wilderness and conservationist. Early in his life, he was a member of scientific explorations into Hudson Bay and Labrador. As a scientist he conducted an exhaustive study of Alaskan caribou, recording their migratory habits from 1920 to 1926. He and his wife Mardy celebrated their honeymoon by taking a 500-mile dogsled research trip through Alaska’s Far North. In 1927, they moved to Wyoming at the behest of the U.S. Biological Survey (now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) to study the elk herds of Jackson Hole. Thanks to his passion for the elk he studied there and the land on which they roamed, Murie became the leading voice in helping create Grand Teton National Park. He was one of the primary authors of the Wilderness Act, protecting the wilderness areas that now offer America’s finest strongholds for wildlife and good hunting. From his research on the Jackson Hole herd, he produced the classic, Elk of North America, earning him recognition as the father of modern elk management.

The Elk Foundation created the Olaus Murie Award five years ago to honor his contributions to the world of elk and conservation and to further his legacy. The award recognizes a wildlife or land-management professional who has made significant contributions to the betterment of wild, free-ranging elk.

Before a standing ovation, L. Jack Lyon didn’t know whether he “should laugh or cry” when presented with the 2003 Olaus J. Murie Award. He was nominated and chosen by his peers and colleagues to receive the award for his in-depth research, love for science and devotion to ensuring the future of wild elk.

Jim Peek, 2000 recipient of the Olaus J. Murie Award, presented the award to his longtime friend Jack Lyon at the Elk Foundation headquarters in Missoula, Montana, on a sizzling day in mid-July. He described Lyon as one of the “best thinkers in the elk world you’ll find.” Indeed, Lyon’s thought and passion for research into elk and elk habitat have done much to shape the way both are now managed.

Born and raised in Sterling, Colorado, Lyon often hunted pheasants with his father. In 1951, he received a master’s degree in wildlife management from Colorado State University for his study of the relationship between pheasant nesting and agriculture. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan for a study on pheasant habitat use, he moved to Montana in 1962 and took a job with the Forest Service’s Intermountain Research Station as a research wildlife biologist and project leader. There, he left pheasants behind and began mapping out research needs for big game habitat management on the national forests. In 1966 he published, “Problems of Habitat Management for Deer and Elk in the Northern Forests.” As the title suggests, this paper paved the way for decades of research yet to come.

If you’ve ever ridden your horse around or swung your camo pants over a locked gate on public lands and taken home a trophy bull—or just a wild hunting experience—you should thank Jack Lyon. Prior to the 1970s, government agencies maintained that logging was universally good for elk because it provided more forage. Then, a handful of federal and state biologists, including Lyon, started to question this idea. They wondered if current logging practices, some of which drastically decreased the amount of hiding cover and increased the number of roads, were making hunter access too easy and actually causing elk populations—especially bulls—to decline. Thanks to their musings, the Montana Cooperative Elk-Logging Study (MCELS) was born. The monumental 15-year cooperative research project (1970-1985) shed new light on the relationships between timber production and elk management.

As one of the scientists for the MCELS, Lyon helped make management recommendations that would change the face of elk habitat and elk hunting. Working with the Forest Service, Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, University of Montana, BLM and Plum Creek Timber Company, Lyon says the study was truly a cooperative effort. “We all got along,” he says. “And we all told the truth. That really helps.”

With 10 seasons of field research in places like the Sapphire and Bitterroot mountains in western Montana and the Ruby Mountains and Little Belts east of the Continental Divide, the study teams discovered a multiple-correlation involving logging and roads, elk vulnerability and hunting opportunity. For Lyon, the highlight of the study—and his career—was the creation of a road density model that showed how habitat effectiveness for elk decreases as more miles of road are open to traffic. Where hunting is allowed, the more roads the fewer elk survive, especially bulls more than 2½ years old.

“That’s been around for 25 years and nobody has revised or questioned it, which just tickles the hell out of me,” laughs Lyon. As a result, the Forest Service closed many logging roads to public access—some just during hunting season, some permanently—creating more secure habitat for elk and, ultimately, much better elk hunting.

Lyon has also researched the effects of fire on big game populations and habitat and helped create a vocabulary of elk management terms to help forest biologists and wildlife biologists “understand what each other is talking about,” he says.

“Everybody in the elk habitat research business played off of what Jack Lyon did,” says Jack Ward Thomas, former chief of the Forest Service and first recipient of the Olaus J. Murie Award. Lyon was the first one to question how elk react to roads and logging, Thomas says, “and to wonder how we manage those things. How can we have elk and elk hunting on managed landscapes?” Thomas says his own studies at the Starkey Project in Oregon were controlled experiments following up on Lyon’s work. “Jack gave us the guidance,” he says.

Lyon’s research isn’t the only reason he was chosen by his peers to receive the Olaus J. Murie Award. People just seem to like having the guy around.

“Jack is the most down-to-earth, friendliest guy,” says former Bugle conservation editor Dave Stalling, now western field coordinator for Trout Unlimited and president of the Montana Wildlife Federation. Stalling has worked with Lyon on various projects, including writing an eight-part series on elk vulnerability for Bugle. “His work not only fits right in with Murie’s amazing accomplishments, but he shares Olaus’ tremendous passion for conservation even outside the workplace, through volunteer work. He’s an amazing researcher with all these accomplishments, and he’s so humble, nice and kind. He’s always laughing, and he’s got this great giggle, too.”

Thomas echoes the praise for Lyon, calling him a “quiet, self-effacing man who does very brilliant work. He’s not one to blow his own horn. He’ll give credit to everyone else but himself.”

Les Marcum, a professor of wildlife biology at the University of Montana, has worked with Lyon both as a graduate student and as a colleague. “He served on both of my graduate committees,” chuckles Marcum. “And he cut the first draft of my master’s thesis to pieces. He just took the wind out of my sails.”

But, as he walks over to the file cabinet in his office, Marcum admits that because of his meticulous attention to detail, Lyon played a major role in making him a better researcher. Thumbing through stacks of files, Marcum pulls out paper after paper published by Lyon. You’d need a truck to carry all of the research that has followed in the wake of Lyon’s pioneering work on elk habitat, he adds.

On a Sunday evening in Missoula’s Rattlesnake Valley, Lyon greets me at his door with a crutch and a smile. We soon find ourselves on his back porch drinking ale from a local brewery, and he tells me about taking a “header” off a cliff while elk hunting in 1991. “When I tried to get up, I found out I broke my leg,” he says. Since then, he’s had some ups and downs with his leg and recently replaced hip, but that hasn’t stopped or even slowed him down from swinging his good leg into the backside of politicians for the sake of elk and elk habitat.

Since retiring from the Forest Service in 1996, Lyon has campaigned tirelessly for the causes he most believes in, like protecting open space and stopping the spread of game farms in Montana (Ballot Initiative I-143). As the scientific advisor to Sportsmen for I-143, he admits the effort was a lot of fun, but wearing. His advice to his fellow campaigners was invariably the same: “Always tell the truth.”

Just south of Lyon’s place and minutes from Missoula sits Mount Jumbo, where nearly 100 elk still come to winter. Lyon worked to secure Mount Jumbo as open space in 1995, as did the Elk Foundation—helping protect 1,600 acres of wildlife habitat. Lyon enjoys having elk out his backdoor, and says, “People put up telescopes in the parking lot downtown to watch them in the winter. That’s pretty cool.”

Jack Lyon’s professional devotion to bettering elk and elk habitat spanned nearly 40 years, yet it seems his personal devotion has no end. He started with the Forest Service as a project leader and retired a project leader, which sounds as though he never received a promotion.

“Actually, I received a number of pay increases, but when you have the best job in the Forest Service, why would you want to be promoted to something else?” Even though he currently walks around with a crutch and a slight limp, he says he will be back to normal in another month—his antelope, deer and elk tags are already in his vest pocket.

Throughout his career, Lyon has insisted that the successful management of elk and elk habitat is the product of cooperation. “It’s not just my research, but what all of us did,” he says. “We brought elk to the forefront.”

Jack Ward Thomas agrees but says that without Lyon’s research, things would be quite different. “For many, many years, he was Mr. Elk in regard to habitat,” says Thomas. “As far as elk are concerned, Jack quietly went about changing the world.”