Wallowa County group seeks crossings to prevent crashes with wildlife

Even though they’re spread across more than 3,000 square miles, Wallowa County drivers and animals can’t stop running into each other.

Across a 22-mile stretch of Oregon Route 82, there have been 900 recorded incidents of cars colliding with deer or elk from 2009 to 2023, according to the Oregon Department of Transportation. Jamie Dawson, the conservation director for the Greater Hells Canyon Council, is part of a group trying to ensure both animals and drivers get from Point A to Point B more safely. Because as it stands now, even the most casual drive can be filled with tension.

“You can’t really drive between Enterprise and Lostine to go get dinner without having a white-knuckle drive looking for deer waiting to hop out on the side of the road,” she said. “That just affects everybody.”

Dawson is part of a local working group looking to solve the problem by installing wildlife crossings on Route 82. Wildlife crossings are passes that use fencing to funnel wildlife under or over highways to reduce the number of animals that walk directly through traffic.

Jim Akenson, an Enterprise resident and a board member of the Oregon Hunters Association, chairs the group. He described the effects of wildlife collisions as a “triple whammy”: they kill animals, damage vehicles and hurt hunting seasons. The larger the animals, the higher the risk of personal injury to drivers as well, Akenson said.

Their work is still in its early stages as the group conducts a feasibility study. They don’t know yet how much the project will cost, what its scope will be or the exact locations of the crossings. Most of the land beside the highway is privately owned, Akenson said, meaning they’ll need buy-in from local landowners.

All of this work is targeting the busiest corridor in Wallowa County. Highway 82 connects the county’s four incorporated communities — Enterprise, Joseph, Wallowa and Lostine — and is the primary way drivers enter and leave the county. The highway also ends near Wallowa Lake, one of the top tourist destinations in Eastern Oregon.

Akenson and the group are pursuing wildlife crossings because they have already proven successful elsewhere. The Oregon Department of Transportation built five wildlife crossings on U.S. Route 97 in central and Southern Oregon between 2012 and 2022. Within the first year of one crossing’s existence, vehicle collisions with deer dropped by 90%.

Oregon Wildlife Foundation executive director Tim Greseth said his organization has been involved in funding wildlife crossings for several years, including a Highway 97 crossing in Klamath County.

While Oregon is known for its wide open spaces, Greseth said the state is also heavily paved. That’s a problem for animals looking for food, water or a mate.

“You could drop a pin anywhere in the state, you’re probably not very far from a road,” Greseth said. “As a consequence, wildlife that need to move to live are constantly facing some sort of barrier in the guise of a road.”

The state removes more than 6,000 deer carcasses from the road per year, and that doesn’t include deer struck on local or private roads. Greseth said that figure also doesn’t include all the smaller animals that could be killed by vehicles. He said wildlife crossings are a benefit for small mammals, birds and snakes that could also come into contact with cars.

Oregon Wildlife Foundation has committed $50,000 to the Wallowa County working group to help with its early planning and outreach and is open to further funding should the project advance, Greseth said.

In the meantime, Akenson and Dawson are working to build public support for the crossing project. At a recent meeting, the Wallowa County Board of Commissioners were receptive to the pitch.

Greseth said wildlife crossings have the potential to bring a lot of different groups together.

“I hope that the folks who live between Enterprise and Wallowa see the same value in this that we do, which is that there’s no reason for all those animals to be dying on the highway if we can do something about it,” he said.

In addition to Wallowa County, the foundation is looking at the Eastern Oregon portion of Interstate 84 for future wildlife crossing projects.