Drivers passing through western Washington on Interstate-90 can now see the first of a series of wildlife overpasses along the busy highway. This particular site, near Snoqualmie Pass, is part of a billion dollar project designed to ease wildlife migration.
“You have a really limited bottleneck for wildlife to move from the north to south Cascades,” Jen Watkins, Conservation Northwest I-90 wildlife bridges coalition coordinator, told the Spokesman Review.
The Washington Department of Transportation hopes to finish this $6.2 million project by the fall of 2019. However, it is just the first of a series of 20 such I-90 overpasses.
“We did a lot of animal monitoring,” Meagan Lott, WDOT spokesperson, told the Spokesman Review. “And this kind of showed that this was a natural migration pattern for animals coming down from the mountain.”
(Photo source: Washington Department of Transportation)