
Jim Kujala, Washington ‘Sportsman-Conservationist Extraordinaire,’ Passes Away
Rest in peace, Jim Kujala, a Washington man once described in this magazine as an “elk hunter and sportsman-conservationist extraordinaire” for all of his years spent pursuing wapiti and volunteerism since age 16 with multiple state and federal wildlife and wildland agencies.

Kujala’s passage was reported this morning by his “hunting, fishing and outdoor adventure buddy” Rich Landers, the retired Spokane Spokesman-Review outdoor reporter, and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, for which Kujala volunteered on a wide range of projects.
Last summer, WDFW renamed one of their annual public recognitions as the Jim Kujala Volunteer of the Year Award for his service over the decades (he also won the award), including with the annual Spokane Kid’s Fishing Day, National Hunting and Fishing Day in 2023, preparing black bear and cougar mounts for the agency’s Region 1 office, as well as participating in “numerous ungulate research and management projects.”
At the ceremony announced the award’s new name, WDFW lauded Kujala as “one of the most knowledgeable people you will ever meet on deer and elk behavior. When WDFW needed volunteer help, Jim answered the call.”
Saint Peter, you’ve got one hell of a guy headed your way.
The following are outtakes from a two-part interview contributor Jeff Holmes did with Jim Kujala in spring 2013 [note: this is an uncorrected version of the final articles, which I don’t currently have access to]:
When I called the best sportsman-conservationist I’ve ever known, Jim Kujala, in May to talk about an interview time, he told me he was up at the Chewelah Casino in the south end of the Colville River Valley. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect to find 73-year-old men at a Casino on a Saturday in May, but he wasn’t gambling. Instead, Spokane Valley’s Jim Kujala pulled over to talk on his way to track a mortality signal of a radio-collared whitetail.
A former winner of the WDFW Volunteer of the Year Award and a physical marvel, Kujala could probably take the award every year if WDFW hadn’t wisely hired him to work part-time several years ago. On a six-month-a-year contract, he works and volunteers year round for WDFW and is integral in their ongoing deer study. The highest functioning insomniac I’ve ever heard of, a man who thrives and lives an extraordinary life on three or four hours of sleep a night, Kujala works as a technician for WDFW in the trapping, collaring and monitoring of deer. He’s the only person I know who dreads spring green up because it makes baiting deer into a trap all but impossible when the world becomes a smorgasbord of new growth.
As his boss at WDFW says, Jim is as honest as the day is long. He’s the hardest working, kindest, and most competent man I’ve ever met. I’ve worked alongside him on habitat projects across Eastern Washington, projects he organized and led, and during that time I discovered and learned many genuinely special things from and about him. Jim’s friends and colleagues independently report that words fail them when trying to express what he means to them and why he’s so exceptional. Those same people nonetheless eagerly try …
In the second half of this interview with elk hunter and sportsman-conservationist extraordinaire, Jim Kujala, he discusses his volunteerism in the outdoors and lessons learned. I think I embarrassed him in part one by using too many “adjectives,” as he put it in an email. But like I’ll eventually tell him when I respond to the criticism, the beautiful way he lives his life makes it damn hard to avoid adjectives. The trick is making the truth not sound like hyperbole.
JH: So your volunteerism, when did that start? Was that kind of a product of your retirement or something you have done your whole life?
JK: Actually my first volunteer project was when I was 16 years old, and it was the first day of school. Back then, of course I was too young to work for the Forest Service, but citizens were pretty involved in fighting major fires, and so was I. I also volunteered over the years doing things like building drift fence and putting in watering troughs for wildlife and, of course, cattle. But, yeah, once I retired, the volunteering kind of opened up. I started off by volunteering at my church for various projects, which I am still involved with layministry at my church. The outdoor-related volunteerism took off pretty heavy duty. I was exposed to that through the opportunities presented by the Inland Northwest Wildlife Council. Since then, I volunteer with the Forest Service, DNR, and other government agencies.
JH: Yeah, I think I remember volunteering with you with the Bureau of Land Management and Fish and Wildlife Service too.
JK: Well, that’s right, although I have trouble remembering the first time I met you in terms of timeline. But I do remember my first reaction to seeing you and thinking, “Wow, there’s this huge guy with wide shoulders and a giant back,” and I remember thinking to myself, “That’s a guy I’d like to have pulling on an elk.”
JH: Yeah, I think I first volunteered on a project you led in late 2004 or early 2005. We’ve done a lot of projects together, and you’ve done a heck of a lot more without me. So I wonder if you might describe the span and trajectory of your outdoor-related volunteer projects.
JK: Well, as you know, it started with that elk project with Woody Myers in the Blue Mountains and progressed on to his mule deer project. Then I volunteered with a graduate student from WSU out at Swanson Lakes on a badger research project. And then I worked with a biologist out on the Escure Ranch capturing mule deer fawns on a fawn-survival study. I did some vegetation sampling for a study on mule deer. That vegetation study took place all the way from the Snake River on the south to the mountains up around the river near Northport. Something that I really got out of a lot of these projects, especially Woody’s mule deer project, was the opportunity to hike all over Eastern Washington, seeing the landscape. Of course, a lot of that is private land, and I had to get permission from landowners to go on their property and monitor whatever it was I was chasing at the time.
JH: Can we talk about some of your more notable stories from projects? Maybe you can start off with giving an overview of the badger project you worked on with a graduate student from Washington State University.
JK: Okay, that was a couple-month project out at Swanson Lake. To begin with, of course with the assistance of Dale Williams particularly because Dale is a small animal trapper. We trapped something like 17 badgers, put radios into them—we had a vet do that, of course—and then we monitored those badgers for a couple months. Two episodes that I got involved in specifically was a 24-hour-a-day monitor. It was pretty interesting, a lot of movement and how they share their dens with each other, as opposed to most animals who aren’t willing to do that, but the badgers do. Once in a while, they had a squabble, and I got to see some pretty good fights.
JH: Wow, you actually got to see them?
JK: Oh, yes, yeah, we saw the fights.
JH: How were you monitoring them that you were able to see it? What did that look like?
JK: Well, I was monitoring them with the radio. Tracked them down with the radio, and then when I was close to the signal, I started sneaking up in the direction they were. Because the biggest thing was to actually come up with an observation of the badgers, and what are they doing, and where are they going, and follow them, and keeping track of that information and reporting it back.
JH: So you basically got to hunt badgers?
JK: I did.
JH: Catch-and-release badger hunting, I like it.
JK: [Laughing] Yeah, it was good. I mean, it was tiring a couple times on those 24-hour ones, but I would pick up a badger and take off on it and follow it. But then in the night when it got to be less active, I would set my alarm clock for every 15 minutes. I’d check on the badger, and then I’d go to sleep, and the alarm clock would go off, and I’d check again. It worked from midnight until three o’clock. Coincidentally, I’d just gotten ready to turn the radio off and go to sleep, and the badger came out of his hole. So I followed him about 300 yards where he started digging a new den. It was just kind of interesting to follow him, particularly in the dark with a radio signal.
JH: So I heard something about you rescuing a deer in a basement?
JK: I was up on the South Hill [in Spokane], and this guy has a very good-sized backyard with a lot of deer goodies. He had two big bushes that literally covered the wall. I think they were initially about three feet apart, but they grew together. So this guy went out to chase this deer out of his yard, and it ran in between the bushes. But in between the bushes was his basement window. So you see what happened. So he called the game department, and actually one of the customer service people called me and said the sheriff’s department had called and was there something I could do, maybe see what it’s all about. And I went up there, and the deer was in the basement for sure. The guy asked what he could do about it, and I told him to close the door to the basement and stay out of there. When I got there sheriff’s deputies asked about what to do. I said we’d go in there and see if we can’t capture this deer, put it in a truck, and haul it out of town, and they said, ‘What’s this “we” stuff?’ I said, ‘Officer, it’s really not that big of a deal if you know what to do, and I’ll show you when we get in there.’ One of them came in the basement with me, and I managed to get it in the washroom where it was at a disadvantage because it could barely move, subdued it and hogtied it. I was still pretty young at capturing deer then, but I wrapped a towel around its head. The two of us carried it out and put it in the back of my truck, and I took it to south of Spokane and released it.
JH: [Laughing] That’s great.
JK: The guy who owned the house was taking a lot of pictures because he was going to have some stories to tell his relatives. There was glass all over from where that deer went through, but it was uninjured from the fall into the basement.
JH: So what was your SWAT team encounter?
JK: That was an injured deer that had a dislocated leg. It was running around in the property at Spaulding’s auto wrecking yard. So there are cars all over, and it was running back and forth, or trying to run, jumping up on the cars and falling off. It was a pretty catastrophic scene really, and I told them just to leave it alone. At that point, I was taking my grandson with me on these road kill episodes, and he was about six then. So I went to the surrounding businesses and let them know I was going to have a rifle out because there was a problem with a deer. So I got up on top of the hill over there by Spaulding’s there’s a road that goes up right by the freeway. I’m sure that somebody saw me with the rifle and called the SWAT team unbeknownst to me. Actually, I had two rifles there because I did want to make sure that within that area with all the cars that I may have a good short shot with a .22 or if not, I’d use a 30-30. So, anyway, I got down, and I did get the deer right there and ended that part of the story. I headed back to the truck to leave the rifles and get my retrieving sled. Around the time I got about 100 yards from the truck, the SWAT team showed up. It was pretty impressive. Obviously, I had both guns unloaded, but it was a pretty impressive group there that I was walking toward. They wanted to know what I was doing, where’s my identification, how and why. So it was kind of a sticky wicket there, of course, because they didn’t know what was going on, so my grandson had a great experience there. He was all eyeballs. But this was very early into the roadkill program, and what it established was that anytime we got a call we’d call the sheriff’s department and let the dispatcher know we’re out there doing stuff like that. That’s been our policy ever since. If we’re going to actually put an animal down, we report to the sheriff’s department to do that primarily because they monitor the no-shooting zones.
JH: Shifting gears, I know that involving youths in the outdoors is really important to you and that you’ve done quite a bit of work toward that end. Will you tell me a little bit about your thoughts about involving youths in our sport and some of the best ways to go about doing that?
JK: From the activity side of it, obviously, it’s important to coordinate the youth to get them interested, but I think that there’s room for more training. I mean, it’s one thing to just take the youth out and expose him or her, either one, to the outdoors. I mean, that’s great. But looking at all the details and all the intricacies of ecosystems and studying what makes an ecosystem tick can really generate some interest from today’s youth, and then “Bam!” it causes a lot of them to continue on with an interest in the outdoors. I think a lot of people get zeroed in on, well, for example, the kill and neglect some of the other things that go along with it.
JH: So you’ve been instrumental on a number of youth efforts over the years, including coordinating a big part of Kids’ Fishing Day at Clear Lake for many years. I know you think that events like that are really important or you wouldn’t do them, and so do I or I wouldn’t have volunteered for you for years, but do you ever think there are better ways to expose kids to the sport for the first time?
JK: Yes, I do think those events are very important, but I do worry a little bit. Just the other day I watched a volunteer at this year’s event help a little girl land a big rainbow that was dropping eggs as they pulled it out of the water. That volunteer said to the little girl, jokingly, of course, “Aw, geez, look at all the other fish you’re killing.” I can definitely understand his comment, but it was out of place, and it tore that little girl up.

JH: So it’s always seemed like you put a lot more stock in the quality of the engagement in fishing and hunting rather than in just exposing them to the sports.
JK: That’s right. There’s a lot more to it. When you catch a fish, your rod is jumping around, and there’s a fish jumping around, a lot of excitement. But the excitement shouldn’t end right there. There’s a lot more excitement to come; it ends at the table with a good meal.
For years Kujala saw the excitement end at the catch at kids’ fishing events and watched as kids wasted or were allowed to waste the fish they had caught. He figured the best thing that he could do was to coordinate fish cleaning efforts where he and volunteers would clean kids’ trout for them, demonstrate how it was done, and either have the option to take those trout home or to put them on ice immediately and donate them to the Union Gospel Mission.
JH: What are some easy and positive ways you see, not only for families with kids but for the public at large, to engage in to give back to the resources we depend on for our sports.
JK: One thing I don’t think the general public realize is that all these state and federal agencies have volunteer projects, and they all have an extensive need for volunteers, even if it’s just physical labor, even if it’s just putting up a fence to create an exposure. If people really want to get involved in volunteering and looking more realistically and completely at the great outdoors, well, there’s a lot of opportunities out there with agencies like the DNR, the Forest Service, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, and more. There’s a tremendous amount of need, and most of these agencies are hurting for money. For most of these projects they do, the volunteer labor makes a tremendous difference when it comes time to do the final tallies. Volunteerism makes a tremendous difference in not only carrying out these projects, but also in the quality of the end product. At a lot of the projects I’ve worked on, the dollar value of the volunteer hours donated far exceeds the cost of materials and staff time to that agency.
JH: So the Department of Fish and Wildlife takes quite a bit of abuse from some members of the public, often members of the public who don’t have a clue about how things actually work. I know that you don’t agree with everything that government does, so why do you continue to both work and volunteer so passionately for Fish and Wildlife?
JK: Oh, yes, I think that the Department is comprised mostly of tremendously dedicated and gifted individuals and that the stereotype of the government employee who sits around and doesn’t do much does not hold. There are so many good people, particularly in the field of biology and the other sciences that work out in the field and who put in long hours out of dedication to what they are doing. That’s pretty impressive to me. Those critics who criticize without knowing what they are talking about are mistaken because, in actual practice, there are a lot of people who are really dedicated and talented and are working hard… But I don’t think I’d be human if I didn’t have some disagreements with some of the policies set by government agencies focused on the outdoors. Growing up in Montana, though, and being exposed to the stereotype of the lazy county agent, I had more than a few examples so I was kind of tainted in my youth in my views. But, still, I am really impressed by a lot of dedicated people and their work at WDFW.
JH: You and [fellow volunteer] Dave Ross talked this winter on the Grande Ronde about the importance of keeping moving and staying busy and not just slumping out on the couch. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because you’re probably the busiest person I have ever met who stays so busy almost solely by choice.
JK: Well, I don’t know about that. When I first went to work for Bonneville, there were a lot of people who were hired just after the completion of Bonneville Dam and Grand Coulee. I was hired to learn and replace those people. But most of them retired and went home and sat in front of the bay window in easy chairs, and that’s where they died. I said, ‘That’ll never happen to me,’ and I hope I can continue that… I am a believer that the more the body does, the more it’s capable of doing, and the less it does, the less it wants to do, you know, whether it’s the mental capacity or the physical. You slow down, and muscles atrophy, and now they can’t do what they could…I guess I would have to say, blessed with a very resilient body, and my health is very good so it’s allowed me to do a lot of things that I know other people in my age bracket can’t do. It pains me to see that other people can’t—I recognize that—but I’m thankful for what I do have.