07/06/2026
Ninety-five thousand crossings is not a number. It is a five-year conversation between a highway and a landscape that refused to stay divided.
The fencing is the part most people miss. The tunnels and bridges get the credit, but without long continuous fence lines guiding animals toward the structures, the crossings would have sat mostly empty. The fence does not trap. It translates — turning a wall of asphalt and speed into something an elk or grizzly can actually read and follow.
Grizzly bears especially are not animals that walk blindly into tight concrete tunnels. They needed time. Camera traps caught the hesitation — the same individuals circling, sniffing, retreating, then finally committing. Trust, in a species that remembers danger across decades, does not arrive quickly. It negotiates.
What the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes built here is not just infrastructure. It is a restatement of something older than the highway — that this land was always meant to be moved through. Elk were crossing these valleys long before asphalt existed. The tunnels did not create new behavior. They recovered something that had been interrupted.
Seventy to eighty percent fewer collisions in the fenced segments. That is not an engineering win. That is a relationship repaired.
The road was never the end of the story. The fence just helped everyone find the next chapter. [F7BDV]
