Kitty Takes a $114 Million Walk Into Your Yard

hypothetically, in the future

You may have been seeing stories this week about California’s $114 million “cougar bridge,” a newly controversial overpass across the 101 freeway in the Los Angeles suburbs that’s supposed to allow mountain lions and other wildlife to pass safely between wilderness areas. The project is running seriously late and tens of millions of dollars over budget, with a story in City Journal yesterday not unreasonably calling it “a jobs program for environmentalists.” A comparable wildlife overpass in Colorado opened late last year over the I-25 in Colorado for a total cost of…$15 million, somehow shaving off a cool hundred-million. The cost overruns in California exceed the total cost of the whole project in Colorado. So Newsom 2028, obviously.

Fighting the other side of the messaging war, stories have just begun to show up in Los Angeles media about how successful the bridge already is. The animals just adore it, and the whole project is so close to being done, trust us.

It’s not. Ask me how I know.

Kitty can cross as soon as kitty can get a hundred feet of nylon climbing rope, because that’s a big wall where a bridge is supposed to be.

The construction crew goes home before 4:00, and the south side of the site isn’t secured at all. So it’s not that hard to just go see the thing, although I am of course telling you that it’s dangerous and you shouldn’t. Standing at the face of the almost-a-bridge, you can see that the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is much stranger than any of the news stories have managed to convey. For one thing, the idea that it connects wilderness to wilderness so kitty can have bigger wilderness for making baby kitties is missing a whole bunch of curious details. Watch what happens when you look south from the south side of the thing that’s supposed to start carrying mountain lions:

That’s the back of somebody’s house, right at the end of what will eventually be the mountain lion funnel, once they build the long and gentle slope that’s supposed to come down from the bridge. There’s a quite narrow trail into the hills between two neighborhoods, across the street and up a steep path, but the bottom end of the thing for wild animals is going to be dropping gifts next to somebody’s swimming pool.

I climbed that steep trail, cleverly arriving late in the 96-degree afternoon to make the experience even more pleasant, and this is what it looks like from the top:

Office buildings to the right of the freeway, and then a bunch of houses just out of the frame to the right, but the circled thing here…

…is the Ilan Ramon Day School, which has a preschool program and a K-5 program tucked into a dead end that sits up against the hills. You can see the proximity of the campus a little better in this zoomed-in shot:

And here’s a better look at where the houses start, over on the right:

This one gets in the residential neighborhoods on both sides, with the thing for mountain lions right in the middle:

So the mountain lion bridge doesn’t quite funnel mountain lions between a pair of neighborhoods and a pre-school campus, but it’s curiously close for both. The Cheesecake Factory has its West Coast offices just up the road, if you know any mountain lions who are looking to get into the restaurant industry.

From another angle…

…you can see that the north side of the wildlife bridge will feed animals into the extensive grounds of the Calabasas Landfill, with those structured hills at the top. So the mountain lion bridge connects residential neighborhoods through a preschool campus and over to a garbage dump.

I spent a couple of hours trying to get at the north end end of the bridge, and did I mention the heat, but I couldn’t get into the landfill. I offered to throw something away, but they weren’t impressed by the quantity of my garbage. The trails in Cheeseboro Canyon didn’t do it for me at all. But I did find a bunch of signs that reminded me how soon the wildlife bridge would be open:

The whole thing has the odor of a miniature high-speed rail project, if you remember that comparable photography day. My plan today was to make like a mountain lion and cross the bridge, but I couldn’t get up there. I’ll try again, and it certainly looks like I’ll have plenty of time to get back to it before they finish construction. If you hope to one day take a bullet train to a wildlife bridge, I’d pencil in a date in the 2040s. But if you’re looking for a house with a closer connection to the local apex predators, I know just where you should put in an offer.