Multimillion-dollar wildlife bridge in NorCal gets first travelers before it opens

Why did three mule deer just cross Route 97 in Siskiyou County? The answer: California has built a new $20 million overpass dedicated for wildlife. 

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The deer, caught on a trail camera in late May, are the first confirmed animals to travel the wildlife overcrossing, which Caltrans is slated to complete by the fall. A bobcat may have padded across the unfinished project in January, but the footage of the passage wasn’t definitive.

The California Department of Transportation and a big group of partners designed the wildlife bridge, which is approximately 100 feet long by 140 feet wide, to address the high rate of cars killing deer and elk on the two-lane highway.

“The primary problem on the highway was the mortality,” Fraser Shilling, who participated in the project as the director of the UC Davis Road Ecology Center, told SFGATE. “There’s truck traffic that goes through there, and they don’t slow down. They hit whatever’s on the road, so a lot of deer and elk were getting killed.”

Route 97, which begins near Weed — about 20 miles south of the project area — and stretches all the way through Oregon and Washington into Canada, bisects migration corridors for elk and mule deer, according to Caltrans. 

Vehicles killed over 50 deer and 16 elk in the area between 2015 and 2020, Caltrans reports. Prior to that, former state game warden Rennie Cleland kept meticulous records of the animals hit in the region. That data helped to inspire and inform the construction of the new overcrossing, according to Wesley Stroud, an environmental program manager for Caltrans who worked on the project. 

The initiative also includes about 3 miles of 8-foot-high wildlife fencing along the highway and an additional concrete box culvert under the road that acts as an alternative way for wildlife to cross.

“It’s nice to see all the hard work that everybody’s put into this paying off, and that’s what those deer showed me,” Stroud told SFGATE. “You build these things in the right location where the animals want to be, and you’re going to get usage.”

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The combination of the fencing and the crossings is expected to safeguard not only deer but the rest of the area’s abundant wildlife, including mountain lions, black bears, Rocky Mountain elk and a local pack of gray wolves.

Considering many of the state’s similar projects have not debuted yet, the deer’s impromptu visit marked a key milestone worth celebrating, according to Shilling. 

“This was [one of the first] wildlife overcrossing[s] planned in the state almost 10 years ago,” he said, “… and now these are the first animals to go over a [state highway] wildlife overcrossing in California.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 11:30 a.m., June 4, to reflect that these are the first animals to go over a state highway wildlife overcrossing.