By Jen Clancey STAFF WRITER
U.S. Highway 191 is the only public road that connects the populous communities of Gallatin Valley to Big Sky and West Yellowstone. Semis, pickup trucks and cars blur by on the strip of pavement at 55-70 miles per hour, bisecting the agricultural fields of Gallatin Gateway, as well as the foothills of the Gallatin and Madison ranges where deer and elk exit higher elevations and forage in colder months.
It’s a route that hosts two hotspots for wildlife-vehicle collisions in Gallatin County, identified by researchers in 2024. Between 2008 and 2022, 2,625 white-tailed deer, 625 mule deer and 312 elk were struck and killed by vehicles in Gallatin County. The mouth of the Gallatin Canyon and the junction of U.S. 191 and Montana Highway 64 are priority sites for conservationists and road experts due to their high number of wildlife vehicle collisions.
Drivers familiar with the route know there’s a problem too—of the forty-six who responded to a reader survey published by Explore Big Sky about U.S. 191, 14 noted that they had personally been in a wildlife-vehicle collision. Most respondents believe there is more that can be done to prevent these accidents.
One of those respondents is Holly Pippel, a wildlife photographer and advocate who lives in Gallatin Gateway. Pippel has lived in Gateway since 1995 and has grown fond of the diverse wildlife in the area.
“Mountain lions, bobcats, ermine, mink, bears … an occasional wolf in Gateway down at this end will come through,” Pippel said. “Everything’s trying to make a living.”
In one recent year, Pippel alone counted 18 dead elk on the roadside, which she reported to the Bozeman-based nonprofit Center for Large Landscape Conservation for their Wildlife and Transportation Assessment. On Feb. 28, 2025, she photographed a struck elk that had been moved off the road, and lit on fire some hours later. She remembered a time when one driver, unfamiliar with the area, struck three elk in Gallatin Gateway at night.
It’s a corridor CLLC, an organization that studies ecological connectivity in landscapes globally, has been focused on for the last few years—in September 2024, they teamed up with the Montana Department of Transportation to apply for funding of a wildlife crossing bridge over U.S. 191. In December, CLLC learned that their project proposal, valued at about $22.8 million, was rejected. In total, states across the U.S. asked for $600 million in funds for projects, five times the amount the grants could pay for.
The problem of wildlife-vehicle collisions remains, and grows. For conservationists, drivers and state agencies, the issue poses a safety threat and concerns about herd health.
“We’re certainly not giving up on this project,” Elizabeth Fairbank, road ecologist with CLLC, told EBS. “It’s not getting better on its own.”
Community contributors pledged $3 million in donations to help match federal funding if the application proved successful. Fairbank hopes pledges will return as CLLC looks into alternatives outside of the federal Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program, a program included in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in 2022. Fairbank said it’s hard to predict funding sources in the future, especially amid funding freezes enacted by a new administration. Structure changes like new leadership in U.S. Secretary of TransportationSean Duffy steps in as U.S. Secretary of Transportation.
Amid the uncertainty, researchers continue to collect data about the significance of ungulate species’ movement around U.S. 191.
Julie Cunningham, a biologist with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, began research on elk movement in the Gallatin Gateway area in 2023. She said the project is different from typical FWP research because it concerns not only hunters but conservationists, county officials and drivers as well.
“It’s a little outside the box,” Cunningham said. “But it’s been really fun and rewarding because of the amount of community interest.”
She said that results indicate elk use the area as habitat, not just a stop along the way on a longer seasonal migratory journey. Though a work in progress, the results can inform county planners in future land use in the area.
According to Envision Gallatin, a project by the Gallatin County’s Department of Planning and Community Development, 74% of private land in Gallatin County is free of zoning. Unzoned spaces without neighborhood plans tend to be used for agriculture, like acres in Gallatin Gateway.. As a result, “few local review mechanisms” are in place to ensure development happens with the community and environment in mind. The county is holding public meetings to discuss zoning reform, which could result in solutions, such as creating a framework for all unzoned areas. The next meeting is on March 13 at 1:30 p.m. with the Gallatin County Commission.
According to Cunningham, FWP spends about $20,000 to $30,000 responding to wildlife conflicts in the Bozeman area annually. As the area grows, conflicts caused by animals making “small movements” through yards, in subdivisions and properties aren’t going away and while well-intentioned property owners appreciate wildlife, they sometimes wish the animals could go somewhere else, Cunningham said. “But we’re running out of ‘somewhere elses,’” she said.
Cunningham said she sees overpasses as just one part of a broader mitigation plan.
“One of the things I think about is, are there other tools too? You know, what about animal detection systems?” Cunningham asked. “The overpasses may be the right tool in some areas. And I think … they’re one tool, but they’re not the only tool.”
She highlighted the effectiveness of animal detection systems, signs that would detect animal crossings and alert drivers. A 2019 assessment by Marcel Huijser, a road ecologist with the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University, found that costs of detection systems on U.S. Highway 89 in Paradise Valley were similar or lower than the financial burden of allowing crashes to continue. In 2024, Huijser found that the benefits exceed costs of constructing wildlife crossing options, at several sections of U.S. 191 between, north and south of Big Sky and between the junction of U.S. 191 and U.S. Highway 287 and West Yellowstone.
“You could argue that … along many road sections, we’re losing more money by doing nothing,” Huijser said.
In the 2024 study, Huijser found two significant hotspots for wildlife-vehicle collisions in Gallatin County: the mouth of the canyon in Gallatin Gateway and the junction of U.S. 191 and Montana Highway 64. But even beyond those two hotspots, there are many sites in need of mitigation along the route as a whole.
“To say that improving the two sites would then improve everything, is false,” Huijser said.
An area ‘worth saving’
The first step in a conservation hierarchy is to avoid areas worthy of conservation and protection. If that step isn’t feasible, the next-best step would be mitigation, which Big Sky and Gallatin Gateway community members hope to accomplish with wildlife-friendly infrastructure, and the third would be compensation—making up for risks by providing benefits and refuge elsewhere.
“We typically go immediately to mitigating impact, meaning acceptance of impacts and trying to reduce the severity of those impacts,” Huijser said. “In mountainous regions adjacent to the river, that is the easiest place for people to build a road. It is probably also one of the most damaging places ecologically to build the road.”
An example of avoiding impact would be infrastructure like an elevated monorail through the Gallatin Canyon, Huijser said.
The Gallatin Valley, especially around more undeveloped agriculture like the ones in Gateway, is popular range for ungulate species. Put simply, the habitat is irresistible.
“There’s fantastic food for ungulates on the agricultural fields. We basically created something that deer especially love in that area,” Huijser said. “We have an increasingly busy highway cutting through it.”
To continue the effort to implement wildlife crossing infrastructure, CLLC recommends remaining careful behind the wheel and reaching out to representatives at the state and federal levels to encourage wildlife crossing and mitigation efforts.
Pippel believes a structure like an overheard wildlife crossing with enough accessible land on both sides would be an ideal solution. After a winding 40-mile drive through the canyon, the brief expansion to a second, northbound lane for passing and gaining speed is a welcome change for drivers heading away from Big Sky. It’s here that drivers on their journey exit the most of the canyon, and enter Gallatin Valley, with a spectacular view of the Bridger Range on the horizon. It’s also a spot where people regain cell service after 45 minutes or more of radio silence.
“There’s a lot of things that are distractions for drivers when you come out of the canyon,” Pippel said, behind the wheel of her Chevrolet pickup truck, checking both sides of the road carefully while she navigates the corridor in question.
She emphasized her hope that nearby private lands can be placed under conservation easements to aid the elk populations. It’s not just elk, deer and large mammals that face the impacts of furthering development and fast-moving traffic. Other endangered species also reside in the area.
“It is important to pay attention to these other species that are rare and not necessarily large enough to pose a threat to human safety and not part of that safety analysis,” Huijser said of smaller, scarcer creatures like wolverine and lynx.
As the sun set over the foothills that embrace U.S. 191, Pippel describes the movement of an elk herd across the street. It’s a trek of about 30 feet, but can be life or death for animals and drivers. She recalled one elk holding up traffic until each member of the herd had crossed to the other side.
“We’re part of the greater Yellowstone,” Pippel said. “You know, we’re on the gateway to Yellowstone, historically. And I think it’s worth saving.”
