Getting a bird’s eye view of a future wildlife passage in Thurston County

“Centaurion II is taxiing out to runway one for a southwest departure,” said EcoFlight pilot Gary Craft on a recent Saturday morning.

The six-seater Cessna plane carried Kraft along with one state official, two tribal leaders and two reporters from CT Publishing on a low-altitude flight over South Thurston County.

Officials from Conservation Northwest and the Washington state Department of Transportation organized a series of small local flights on Saturday, Sept. 13, to take a look at wildlife passage areas around Interstate 5 between Olympia and Centralia.

The flights, which were organized through nonprofit organization EcoFlight, are part of a larger effort by Conservation Northwest and the state called the Northern Linkage. The main objective is the construction of a wildlife overpass over Interstate 5 between Tumwater and Grand Mound and conservation of land on either side.

Many officials and stakeholders were invited to participate in the flights Saturday morning. They ranged from local stakeholders who live near the I-5 corridor to staff members from some of Washington’s federal lawmakers, including representatives of Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray, both Democrats from Washington.

CT Publishing joined the morning’s first flight with Kraft. Washington state Department of Transportation Habitat Connectivity Biologist Glen Kalisz took the passenger seat to tell those aboard about the project and what they were seeing while Chairman Dustin Klatush and Fifth Council Member Thomas Trott, both representing the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation, took the other two seats.

EcoFlight is a nonprofit based in Aspen, Colorado. The small group of pilots and environmental advocates operate two small single-engine Cessna 210 aircrafts to give people a top-down view of nature. According to the nonprofit, the planes have a unique ability to fly low and slow. They have top mounted wings with no struts below, making visibility and photography easy for passengers.

Kraft added that the group is often hired to give flights to stakeholders, whether they are landowners, politicians or others, to give people a view of the landscape that projects or conservation efforts might impact.

“From the air, we connect stakeholders with differing viewpoints to advance conservation and environmental justice,” reads the nonprofit’s “need to know” guide. “Environmental challenges, conservation opportunities, and human impact on vast ecosystems are often difficult to visualize from the ground and are best understood from above … Flight provides an honest and engaging perspective of the landscape and offers a better understanding of the scale and complexities of the issues at hand.”

The roughly 45-minute local flight took off from the Pierce County Airport at Thun Field. The flight loaded up just after 10 a.m. and began its sprint down the runway at around 10:20. Immediately after takeoff, the passengers got an amazing view of Mount Rainier to the east despite a bit of early morning fog.

“We live in a beautiful state,” Trott said over the plane’s headset.

As the plane climbed to its flight altitude of approximately 18,000 feet and began its journey southwest toward the portion of I-5 south of Olympia, the plane’s passengers took a look at the surroundings, spotting new housing developments, evidence of prescribed burns, energy-producing windmills and, toward the end of the flight, even a Saturday morning Tenino football game.

As the flight continued southwest, low cloudcover began to thicken just west of Tenino, blocking the view.

The objective of the flight was unfortunately a failure as the cloudcover blocked the view of the proposed crossing sites below. The flight was not for nothing, however, as Kalisz took the chance to speak about the project that inspired the fight: connecting habitat in the Cascades to wildlands west of the interstate.

Kalisz pointed out parts of wildlife habitat and forestland to the east of the highway that will be essential to creating the desired habitat connection. He also spoke about similar projects in the state that have already seen success. The state has already installed wildlife crossings, including overpasses over Interstate 90 to the north and underpasses on U.S. Highways 12 and 8. Those have allowed animals such as elk, deer, bears and cougars to cross freely. Interstate 5, however, has more traffic than all of the others, with no specialized wildlife passages.

According to Kalisz, many wildlife species almost immediately took advantage of the overpasses over I-90, with herds of elk bedding down and even rearing young and pushing coyotes and other predators off of the platforms.

“It was within months the elk were on them, and they think they own them,” Kalisz said. “They’re treating these crossings just like habitat.”

Kalisz added that the concentration of cougars is so high that cameras in the area have seen more cougars than more wild parts of the state.

“I think it’s more that they’re easier to detect,” Kalisz said. “I think it’s about the bottle neck of the habitat, but it’s still surprising.”

The mission of the Northern Linkage, however, is not just to create a single wildlife overpass but also create a connecting wildlife corridor on either side of Interstate 5. Securing the wildlife passages around the interstate means defending hundreds of acres from more intense development that has encroached along the rest of Interstate 5.

However, that doesn’t mean the land will become a protected forest.

Conservation Northwest and the state are instead pursuing legal agreements, grants and easements with landowners to prevent the land from being developed. Progress toward the end goal of a wildlife passage was announced earlier this summer on the family property of locals who will be part of the conservation effort.

Read a 2024 report on the efforts online at https://wdfw.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-08/presentation-joint-connectivity.pdf.