Wyoming Game and Fish will induct four new members into the Wyoming Outdoor Hall of Fame this year, adding to a roster that has grown to 70 honorees since Governor Dave Freudenthal created the Hall in 2004 to recognize lifetime contributions to the state’s outdoor heritage.
The 2026 class continues the Hall’s practice of drawing from the full breadth of Wyoming’s conservation history — the biologists whose fieldwork shaped modern big-game management, the volunteers who built the state’s hunter-education backbone, the researchers whose data underwrote grizzly-bear and wolf recovery decisions, and the writers whose work carried Wyoming’s outdoors to the rest of the country.
The Hall was designed to recognize what an agency-run awards program alone could not: sustained, decades-long contributions from people outside the department whose work made Wyoming’s hunting, fishing, and wildlife management possible. The criteria published on the Game and Fish program page describe recognized contributions as volunteer service, environmental restoration, educational activities, audio-visual and written media, the arts, and political and individual leadership — a wide enough door to seat a career biologist alongside a career sporting-magazine writer.
The 2025 class — Doug Crowe, Steve Kilpatrick, and Jim Zumbo — joined a roster of 67 previous honorees, bringing the total to 70 before the 2026 class arrives, according to the agency’s 2025 induction announcement. That 2025 ceremony was held in March 2025 at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody. Game and Fish uses the ceremony as its principal annual public recognition of hunter-conservationist contributions in the state and has held it in Cody in recent years to align with the Center of the West’s museum programming on Western wildlife.
The 2026 inductees’ biographies and the ceremony date will run through the same channel. Wyoming’s hunters — the audience the Hall is largely built to acknowledge — are the direct beneficiaries of every one of the careers being honored, whether the effect shows up in a bull-elk hunt in the Bighorns, a pronghorn tag in the Red Desert, or a mountain-goat unit that exists at all because the fieldwork got done.
