Finally, it looks like a real effort to keep antelope bottlenecks west of Pinedale from closing-
Over the years, we have written about the Trapper’s Point pronghorn migration bottleneck a number of times. There has been growing awareness that the thousands-of-year-old antelope migration from the Wyoming high desert over the Gros Ventre each year, down into Jackson Hole could easily be severed by increasing development.
I had heard something was being done. This summer I visited Trappers Point, walked all around, took photos, but saw no changes to the situation had been made. Today the Jackson Hole News and Guide has some good news. There will be an expansive and expensive overpass built at Trappers Point and another at a dangerous highway crossing about 5 miles to the NW, north of Daniel Junction.
Of course, these overpasses will benefit other kinds of wildlife hit on the highways in this area of increasing traffic and development from the gas fields and subdivisions.
State to spend $9.7M to protect pronghorn: Plan would build fences, highway underpasses and overpasses in Sublette County (WY). By Cory Hatch, Jackson Hole News and Guide.
Comments
Yes!
Good news that we can all agree with!
It is good news, and brings to mind “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. Perhaps lessons will be learned on how to prevent the necessity for this in the future.
It’s about time they got this going. I recall talking to Dr. Lance Craighead, maybe in 1999, about methods of protecting wildlife from road traffic, which he was conducting research on at the time. He was doing a study on the Hwy 30 area around Fossil Butte then and has been instrumental in the initiation and building of the “underpass” on the pass between Bozeman and Livingston, MT.
I know such underpasses were being prototyped in and around Banff about twelve years ago… But then, Wyoming has long taken its wildlife for granted. It’s nice to see that someone in the state has made some ground on looking into this sort of relatively easy solution to a growing problem.
It sucks to see dead wildlife on the roadside, no matter where it is. Always reminds me of how disconnected our society is when it comes to the natural world and our modern conveniences that we claim we can’t live without. The fact is, we can’t live without the natural world.