Earle F. Layser

On April 23, 2026, long-time Jackson Hole-Teton Valley resident, Earle F. Layser Jr., joined his beloved wife, Pattie. He was 86 years old. Earle claimed, Pattie, and their cherished dog, Benji, “had gotten ahead of him on the trail and were waiting somewhere up ahead.”

Born in the Pennsylvania Dutch country, Lebanon, Pennsylvania, on December 14, 1939, Earle first visited Jackson Hole with his parents in 1947, camping out of a wood paneled station wagon in the sagebrush fronting the Tetons.

His parents moved to the deeply rural setting in the mountains along Pine Creek near Cedar Run, Pennsylvania, when he was eight years old. There they pioneered the landmark Canyon Turkey Farm, as documented in an Arcadia book entitled Pine Creek Villages.

Hunting and fishing were the area’s primary outdoor activities: Earle liked to say, “He grew up with a .22 rifle in one hand and a fly rod in the other.”

Earle enlisted in the U.S. Navy the day after High School graduation. It required his parent’s signatures of approval because he was only 17-years old. After serving his four year enlistment during the Cold War aboard a destroyer in the South Pacific, he matriculated in forestry at the University of Montana.

Missoula was still a western town back then--- loggers, cowboys and Native Americans walked Higgins Avenue; silver dollars were still in circulation, and at the Oxford, a cup of coffee cost a nickel and a glass of beer a dime. A sawmill with teepee burners contributing to smog occupied the center of town.

Laboring in sawmills at night, and as a smokejumper in summer, Earle worked his way through college, earning a degree in forest sciences.

An academic achiever, he was awarded graduate research and teaching fellowships at the New York College of Environmental Sciences, where he completed an MSc degree in forest botany. Additional graduate studies in biosystematics at Washington State University followed, after which he accepted a forestry position with the USDA Forest Service Northern Region. In the 1970’s, he served as the Assistant Forest Supervisor for the Bridger-Teton National Forest.

Earle lived an active and enviable outdoor life. He sought out and successfully engaged in a wide range of career roles, experiences and adventures, unpretentiously wearing many hats over the years: a USDA Forest Service forester and administrator, a field botanist, wildlife biologist, scientist, businessman, writer, photographer, scholar and teacher, ski instructor, and U.S. Navy veteran.

Always down to earth, Earle was elated when he once beat local guides in a fly-casting competition in Victor, Idaho. The prize was a case of beer. His ability to wear many hats and to work across scientific disciplines is what defined him. More than a career, it was a way of living-- a lifestyle.

In the 1990s, as a veteran he was recognized by the U.S. Department of Defense for his 1950s service on a destroyer operating in the disputed Taiwan Straits during the so called, Cold War. In 1977, he received the prestigious American Motor’s national conservation award for his work and publications on mountain caribou and grizzly bear in north Idaho and northeastern Washington. In 1980, he published A Flora of Pend Oreille County, Washington, a comprehensive treatment of the flora of northeastern Washington, north Idaho and western Montana. He was the recipient of three different awards from the Wyoming State Historical Society for books that he authored which “contributed to Wyoming’s legacy,” including his 2014 western classic, Cal Carrington’s Life Story.

Earle believed he was fortunate to have lived in the many beautiful places and in the time he did—Alaska, Montana, north Idaho, the Greater Yellowstone, Jackson Hole, and Pennsylvania’s Pine Creek Valley; to have enjoyed fond and close relationships and friends; to have had a rewarding and adventurous career doing what he passionately cared about; and most of all to have met his wife, Pattie, in Bozeman, Montana, and married her on a Teton National Park mountain summit.

When they weren’t fly fishing, cycling, canoeing, skiing, camping, or hiking in the Tetons or Yellowstone’s Lamar or Bechler regions, doing road trips, or other outdoor pursuits or foreign travel, Earle and Pattie wrote, photographed, and published numerous stories for magazines, anthologies and authored several books. Traveling to off-the-map places—Amazonia, Ecuador, Galapagos’ Islands, Arctic Refuge, McNeil Bear Reserve, Tanzania, Madagascar, Uganda, Zanzibar, Mexico, Baja Mexico, Central America, and more—they photographed and wrote about their travels, threatened species, and wildernesses. Earle also operated a successful consulting business, Land Management Services, working throughout the western U.S. on environmental projects and with organizations such as the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.

Earle was a lifelong advocate for wildlife and wildland conservation. His quietly accomplished contributions were often far reaching and left a lasting legacy, such as his advocacy and successful proposal for the establishment of the Salmo Priest Wilderness Area, and in the protection of mountain caribou and grizzly bear in northeastern Washington and north Idaho. Stories about iconic wildlife in his book Green Fire: Stories from the Wild were based in part on his personal knowledge and experiences.

In 2013, before Pattie’s untimely passing, they endowed the Earle and Pattie Layser Distinguished Professorship in Conservation Biology and Policy at the University of Montana. In that same year, they also deeded a life estate to the family’s beloved Pennsylvania Pine Creek farm—which over time had come to be located next to a designated State Wild and Scenic River and a Wilderness Area-- to the Commonwealth’s Department of Natural Resources, in perpetuity for public outdoor recreation purposes. And, in 2015, Earle created a Pattie Layser Greater Yellowstone Writer’s Fellowship program, which is administered by the Wyoming Arts Council, annually awards a stipend to promising nature and conservation writers.

In 2004, Earle published a personal memoir, Darkness Follows Light, which chronicled Pattie’s and his courtship and the exceptional life they had enjoyed together. And the interminable grief he suffered when she passed away before him in 2013.

While not religious in an orthodox sense, the life Earle and Pattie lived was filled with love, spirituality, and nature. Many admired their relationship, saying they were “lucky.” But Earle maintained it was not all luck, while they had been uncommonly fortunate, their life together had been nothing short of providential.

Earle was preceded in death by his father, Earle senior, and his mother Elsie, five half-siblings, and his beloved spouse, Pattie. He is survived by two sons, Brett and Ryon, from his first marriage; two grandchildren, Colton and Nicole, a great grandson, Clay, and several nieces and nephews.