A Family Sold Their 136-Year-Old Farm So Mountain Lions Could Cross The Highway

For 136 years, the Erickson family farmed 94 acres near Tenino, Washington, at the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, working land that was listed on the Thurston County Historic Register as a centennial farm and that had been in continuous cultivation by the same family since the 1880s. In recent years, with the family reduced to three remaining members, Janice Erickson and her daughter Marla LeFevre and granddaughter Kristen made a decision: sell the farm, for $1.1 million, to nonprofit Conservation Northwest, to become the centerpiece of a planned wildlife bridge over Interstate 5, the first of its kind on that particular freeway in Washington State. The bridge would reconnect habitat in the Cascade Mountains with the Olympic Peninsula, creating a safe passage for mountain lions, wolves, elk, fishers, and other wildlife that currently cannot safely cross one of the most heavily traveled highways in the Pacific Northwest. The land will be returned to the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation, whose ancestral territory it was long before the Erickson family arrived.

Marla LeFevre, speaking to The Seattle Times, explained the decision plainly and joyfully: all that are left of the family are three strong pioneer women who are genuinely excited about the farm returning to the original inhabitants of the land and becoming a forever sanctuary for wildlife. Conservation Northwest raised $2.5 million in total to help acquire land for the crossing, which dovetails with existing Chehalis Basin restoration strategies and broader conservation efforts to maintain the habitat connections threatened by growing suburban sprawl along the I-5 corridor. Mitch Friedman, executive director of Conservation Northwest, described the acquisition as unlocking the critical missing piece, the land on the west shoulder of the freeway that a successful bridge requires. The project joins a growing network of wildlife crossings being built or completed across the Pacific Northwest, including several already in use on I-90, and has been described by conservation biologists as a lifeline for mountain lions whose populations on either side of I-5 have been genetically isolating from each other over decades of road-divided habitat. The Erickson family is not mourning the farm. They are celebrating what it becomes next.

Source:https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/washington-state-wildlife-crossing-interstate-5