When wildlife safety turns into fierce political debate
In Island Park, Idaho, a fight over roadkill became a referendum on government control.
The longest main street in America begins at the southern limits of Island Park, Idaho, and ends an eyelash west of the Montana border. On a map of Fremont County, Island Park has the profile of an immense shoelace — 36.8 miles long and, in many places, just 500 feet wide. The town’s main street is its spine, the thoroughfare that connects everything with everything else: It’s how Island Park’s 270 year-round residents, along with its thousands of seasonals, get to Harriman State Park and the TroutHunter fly shop and 500 miles of snowmobile trails. It’s also a segment of America’s longest road, U.S. 20, a federal highway that meanders from Newport, Oregon, to Boston, Massachusetts. More than a million vehicles speed past Island Park each year, many conveying tourists to Yellowstone, which lies beyond the Continental Divide. Eastbound trucks tote lettuce from California; westbounders slosh with Bakken crude. To Island Park, U.S. 20 is a lifeline. To most of America, it’s a conduit.
For Idaho’s wildest inhabitants, it can also be a death trap. Elk traverse the highway as they descend from mountain redoubts to winter range on the Snake River Plain, then return on the crest of spring’s green wave. Moose cross U.S. 20 on their way to browse near the quartz folds of the St. Anthony Sand Dunes. Mule deer, grizzlies and pronghorn all ford the asphalt river, and some perish in the attempt. Between 2010 and 2014, animals caused 94 vehicle crashes along a 56-mile stretch of U.S. 20. Because most collisions go unreported, the real body count is even higher: According to state surveys, 138 ungulates died on U.S. 20 and a connected 9-mile stretch of State Highway 87 in 2018 alone.
Such car-inflicted carnage is not unique to Idaho. More than a million large animals, and around 200 drivers, die annually from collisions nationwide. Over the last two decades, researchers have converged on a solution palatable to politicians on both sides of the aisle: wildlife crossings, tunnels and bridges that funnel creatures under and over highways. If roads are habitat-sundering gashes, crossings are the stitches that sew up rent landscapes. In the three years after the Wyoming Department of Transportation installed eight crossings near Pinedale in 2012, for instance, some 40,000 mule deer and 19,000 pronghorn safely navigated U.S. 191.
So when the Idaho Transportation Department began contemplating wildlife overpasses along U.S. 20 in 2016, you could forgive local conservationists for expecting the proposal to meet smooth sailing. Instead, the crossings inspired a fierce debate about the future of U.S. 20, an argument that pitted conservation’s burgeoning emphasis on large-scale habitat connectivity against the rural West’s long-standing desire to exert local control over land management. The controversy has bewildered more than one observer. “In my world, I look at wildlife crossings as a win-win situation,” Patricia Cramer, the transportation ecologist who first recommended the U.S. 20 overpasses, told me. “Never has anybody said, ‘Not in my backyard.’ Nobody says I don’t want a wildlife crossing.”
Nobody, that is, until Island Park.
ONE BLUEBIRD MORNING in September, I chugged north on U.S. 20 in a procession of RVs, campervans and Subarus back-loaded with mountain bikes — the West’s recreational economy loose on the land. The highway slipped from sagebrush flats to lodgepole forests and back, occasionally do-si-doing with the glittering course of the Henrys Fork River. The speed limit plunged from 65 to 45 mph as the road passed through clusters of gas stations and cabins, though the signs felt more like suggestions — everyone in a hurry to get to a trailhead or a fishing hole, anywhere besides where they already were.
North of town, the road began to climb. The land tightened, crinkling as though squeezed by a giant fist, as the highway wound out of the Island Park caldera — the vast volcanic footprint planted more than a million years earlier by the Yellowstone hotspot — and into the Henrys Lake Mountains. Whippy poles marked snowmobile trails. This tortuous 4-mile stretch was Targhee Pass, and it was the source of the trouble.
Like much of America’s aging infrastructure, the roadbed at Targhee Pass is gradually deteriorating, afflicted by icing, frost heaves and poor drainage. In the fall of 2016, under the National Environmental Policy Act, the Idaho Transportation Department and the Federal Highway Administration began studying how best to remedy the section’s problems — among them wildlife collisions, which accounted for nearly a quarter of Targhee Pass’ crashes (none of them fatal, at least for humans). Swelling tourism would only exacerbate the danger: While just 5,600 vehicles navigated the pass daily in July 2012, the agency forecast summer traffic to reach 9,400 cars a day by 2042.
As traffic intensified, conservationists feared U.S. 20 could eventually truncate wildlife movement. In Idaho and elsewhere, busy highways chronically thwart mule deer and elk migrations — a threat that’s more subtle than roadkill, but, in some cases, more ruinous. “Herds can take a couple of hits on the road,” Kathy Rinaldi, Idaho conservation coordinator for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, told me. “But if they can’t get to their winter or summer range, that’s when they start to die off.”
The Idaho Transportation Department had long recognized U.S. 20’s wildlife dilemma. In 2009, the agency partnered with the state’s Department of Fish and Game and the Wildlife Conservation Society to study animal movements around the highway, affixing satellite collars to 37 elk and 42 moose. Six years later, the department hired Patricia Cramer, who’d consulted on road projects in Utah, Washington, Florida and other states, to convert that research into action. Cramer pored over crash data, conferred with agency staff and environmentalists, and analyzed the movements of the collared critters. In the end, she identified a litany of fixes, including 16 potential crossings scattered along the highway’s length. Three wildlife bridges, she suggested, could span Targhee Pass.
In July 2016, the Idaho Transportation Department invited the Henrys Fork Legacy Project, a collection of agency and nonprofit representatives, to review a draft of Cramer’s report. The group liked the ecologist’s Targhee Pass recommendations, and several of its members, including Rinaldi, penned a letter urging the agency to act on them. “You look around the West, and everybody is going along this path,” Rinaldi said.
That trend is driven by financial motives as well as ecological ones. Collisions not only kill valuable game animals, they often result in property damage and even hospital bills. Marcel Huijser, a research ecologist at the Western Transportation Institute, has estimated that each North American deer crash costs society around $6,600, elk $17,500, and moose more than $30,000. Virtually every Western state has jumped on the crossing bandwagon: There’s the $5 million Parleys Summit bridge in Utah, the $6.2 million Snoqualmie Pass arch in Washington, and the $87 million overpass that may someday assist cougars over California’s U.S. 101. A highway bill introduced in July 2019 by Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., included $250 million for still more passages. As Ed Arnett, chief scientist at the nonprofit Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, put it to me: “How can you say no to saving wildlife, preventing accidents, and reducing insurance costs?”
WHEN, AT 8:30 ON A WEDNESDAY MORNING, I entered the dining room of the Lakeside Lodge, a strenuously rustic resort several miles off U.S. 20, Ken Watts was halfway through his pancakes. Watts — local gadfly, prolific newspaper columnist and bête noire of Fremont County’s conservationists — had greeted my emailed appeal for an interview with skepticism. The Island Park Preservation Coalition, or IPPC, a group he chairs whose ethos is to “keep Island Park like it is,” even held a meeting to debate my request. At last, Watts and several others agreed to speak to me. Given their partially consumed breakfasts, I wondered whether they’d arrived early for a last-minute media strategy session.
Watts, whose knee-length cargo shorts, trim white beard and amiable manner gave him the mien of a retiree on a cruise, proved as voluble in person as he’d been apprehensive over email. An improbable spokesman for a group that denounced federal overreach, Watts had worked for 34 years as an engineer at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, where he’d developed tests to assay other nations’ chemical weapons. In 2006, he and his wife, Patsy, began building a cabin in Island Park, and moved there full-time in 2010. Before long, he fell into politics and eventually opinion-writing, penning a column called “Ken’s Korner” in the Island Park News, a weekly paper that bills itself as “CERTIFIED Politically incorrect and 100% American.” For a time, the News’ publisher labeled him its ace reporter, depicting him in a Gay Talese-style fedora. “Every week I ask myself, ‘What should the people of Island Park know today?’ ” Watts told me. “I hope I’m provoking thought.”
The roots of Island Park’s overpass saga, Watts said, were entangled with a separate, previous drama. In 2013, the Idaho Statesman unearthed documents showing that the George W. Bush administration had explored creating a national monument in the area years earlier. Local officials, surmising that Barack Obama’s Interior Department could revive the idea, used federal funding to study the impacts of a possible protected area and discussed the matter with conservationists. Although a monument was never imminent, Watts resented what he considered an opaque process, alluding in the Island Park News to a “covert plan” to establish one. In 2014, he encouraged Fremont County’s commissioners to put the question to an advisory vote, a nonbinding election gauging popular opinion. The monument was summarily crushed.
Galvanized by victory, Watts and others formed the Island Park Preservation Coalition to stave off other unwanted impositions that could, in theory, change the community’s character. At first, the group didn’t perceive wildlife crossings as such a threat. When Kim Trotter, U.S. program director for a wildlife group called the Yellowstone-to-Yukon Conservation Initiative, touted overpasses at an IPPC meeting in September 2016, she met a cordial reception. The peace, however, would not keep.
There is something at once futuristic and anachronistic about wildlife overpasses, parabolas of green that vault over highways with a Middle Earthish grace. Yet crossings work best in concert with a less elegant technology: roadside fences, which funnel animals away from the highway and toward passages.
String some fencing through the Nevada desert, and no one complains about impaired views. At the base of Targhee Pass, though, squats a subdivision called Big Horn Hills Estates, whose residents weren’t keen to see woven-wire barriers running near their dream properties. In one op-ed, homeowners named Ralph and Connie Kincheloe vented that fencing would force them “to live like animals in a virtual prison.”
By the time I met the IPPC for breakfast, the group’s anti-crossing angst had expanded to fill a thick file labeled “Grievances/Concerns”. Its members were worried about the visual impact: “The view of Island Park from the top of Targhee Pass is spectacular, and to disrupt that aesthetic beauty with overpasses and fences just seems to be counterproductive,” said Bob Stantus, a retired U.S. Air Force officer, to nods around the table. They were also concerned about the price tag: To more nods, a lawyer named Steve Emery said that Idaho’s dilapidated infrastructure had more pressing needs. (The Idaho Transportation Department estimated that building and maintaining the fences and overpasses would cost nearly $500,000 a year spread over three decades.) And, although the agency had held three public meetings and convened a working group, including Watts, to discuss the project, IPPC members were irate that consultation hadn’t begun years earlier, when the state first started studying elk and moose movements. “We felt like we weren’t being treated fairly as a community,” Watts said, to the most nods of all.
They experienced the fiercest anxiety, though, over public-land access. The transportation agency had insisted that gates in the fencing would permit hunters and snowmobilers to reach trails unimpeded, but Watts didn’t buy it. For overpasses to work, he pointed out, animals have to feel safe using them — which suggested to him that human travel would be restricted. Gates, he claimed, “would defeat the whole purpose.”
Watts’ Island Park News column gave him a powerful platform to oppose the overpasses. Beginning in early 2017, he and Leanne Yancey, another outspoken IPPC member, inveighed against the crossings weekly, predicting the structures would “desecrate” Island Park and “destroy the beauty of the natural gap God carved between the rugged mountains.” Their missives were countered by the crossings’ supporters, who defended the bridges as “the most logical and cost-effective long-range solution.”
The IPPC’s most vocal sparring partner was Jean Bjerke, a nature photographer who’d built a home in Island Park with her husband, Randy, in 2000. “I thought, when I retired, I would settle into a quiet life of photography and tend my garden,” Bjerke, who’d grown up organizing civil rights protests during the tumultuous 1960s, told me. Instead, Bjerke flung herself into the cause, writing op-eds and conducting social media outreach for a pro-crossing coalition called the Island Park Safe Wildlife Passage Initiative, which eventually evolved into a nonprofit called the Henrys Fork Wildlife Alliance.
