A Bridge Built Just for Elk
North America's largest wildlife bridge just opened over I-25 in Colorado — and in June, cameras caught the first elk crossing it on their own.
✓ Verified · cross-checked against 2 independent sources
In June, a Colorado Department of Transportation camera caught something engineers had been waiting six months to see: three elk, walking calmly across a bridge built just for them.
The bridge cost fifteen million dollars. Not one car will ever drive on it.
It's called the Greenland Wildlife Overpass, and it now arches over Interstate 25 between Larkspur and Monument, connecting nearly 39,000 acres of habitat that a six-lane highway used to cut clean in half. At 200 feet wide and 209 feet long, it's the largest structure of its kind in North America — big enough that engineers gave it real sightlines and open sky, because, as CDOT Environmental Manager Chuck Attardo put it, "animals are like people. They like choices."
Here's why that stretch of highway needed one so badly. More than 100,000 cars pass through it every day, and for years this section saw roughly one wildlife collision a day during migration season. Fencing and five underpasses installed back in 2022 already cut collisions here by 91 percent. But underpasses only go so far for elk and pronghorn — animals that want to see what's ahead before they cross. So this stretch got something those species could actually use: wide open sightlines, sky overhead instead of a tunnel.
So CDOT, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, and Douglas County built one — and did it fast. What was expected to take longer was finished in ten months, ahead of schedule. The federal and state governments had budgeted thirty million dollars for it; the contractor, Kraemer North America, brought it in for fifteen. CDOT is now figuring out how to put the leftover money back into the same corridor, including more fencing to extend the protection further down the road.
Then came the part no amount of engineering could guarantee: would the animals actually use it?
In June, the answer arrived on camera. Three elk, unprompted, walked the length of the overpass and back into the habitat on the other side — the first confirmed crossing since the bridge opened. It's a small moment, but it's the one the whole ten-month, fifteen-million-dollar project was built for.
The cameras stay up for more than this one moment — Attardo says moose, deer, black bear, and mountain lion are all expected to eventually show up on the same footage. And the project is already shaping what's next: CDOT has identified six more priority corridors across Colorado, from Raton Pass at the New Mexico border to the state's largest bighorn sheep migration route near Winter Park, once funding is secured.
It's a simple idea; the world's wildest animals don't actually want to cross a highway, they just need a way over it. Colorado just proved, on camera, that if you build it well enough, they will.
Verified across two independent sources — full story at goodnewsdailytv.com.
If you could build a wildlife bridge anywhere, where would you put it? Tell me in the comments.
Sources: cbsnews.com · denvergazette.com
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