Safe Passage

The I-40 Pigeon River Gorge Wildlife Crossing Project

a search for safe passage

I-40 rebuild offers rare opportunity for wildlife conservation

Please note: Since this story published in November 2024, North Carolina Governor Josh Stein announced that two lanes of Interstate 40 through the Pigeon River Gorge are expected to re-open March 1, 2025.

Featured in (from left) Asheville Citizen Times, Smoky Mountain Living magazine, Smoky Mountain News, and Knoxville News Sentinel.

By Holly Kays
When the Safe Passage coalition started working in 2017 to make Interstate 40 a safer place for people and wildlife through the Pigeon River Gorge, nobody knew that, in a few short years, entire sections of the critical roadway would vanish in the wake of Hurricane Helene. The scale of Helene’s damage was unfathomable, with 106 people confirmed dead in North Carolina alone and survivors left to contend with tens of billions of dollars in damages to property and infrastructure. The region is in mourning—but the rebuilding process may offer a once-in-a-generation opportunity to save the lives of future travelers.

“If we want to look for silver linings, I think there is a chance that we could use this long pause in traffic on I-40 to create some win-wins for wildlife, driver safety, and flood resilience along the road,” said Ron Sutherland, chief scientist for coalition partner Wildlands Network.

The 28-mile stretch of I-40 that passes through the Pigeon River Gorge bisects a rugged landscape that falls mostly within the Pisgah National Forest, Cherokee National Forest, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It’s one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, and before Helene, the road handled about 26,500 vehicles every day—a formidable barrier to natural wildlife movement across the landscape. Between 2018 and 2020, researchers Liz Hillard of Wildlands Network and Steve Goodman of National Parks Conservation Association analyzed 304 collisions between vehicles and large animals like bear, deer, and elk. Nationwide, wildlife–vehicle collisions kill more than 200 people annually and cost over $10 billion, according to a 2023 report from the Federal Highway Administration.

Through collaboration with government agencies and efforts to secure funding for wildlife crossings, Safe Passage has been working toward infrastructure solutions that would prevent such crashes from happening. Thanks to the group’s partnership with the NC Department of Transportation, the designs for five I-40 bridges up for replacement were amended to include wildlife-friendly modifications, and the agency was poised to use a $2 million wildlife-crossing allotment from the NC General Assembly to install fencing and evaluate Wildlands Network’s and NPCA’s research-based proposals for improving connectivity in the gorge.

Then Helene struck.

The hurricane hit the Gulf Coast as a Category 4 storm and then moved north, dropping record-setting amounts of rain on communities across Southern Appalachia. A gauge on the Pigeon River just below the power plant at Waterville, located along the I-40 corridor, jumped from its normal level of four feet up to nearly 22 feet before the river tore the gauge out around 10 a.m. September 27, as the worst of the flooding unfolded. Three of the five bridge replacements were completed, or nearly so, when the hurricane arrived, and they came through mostly unscathed. However, other areas of the road incurred catastrophic damage. Eastbound lanes in the four-mile stretch between the Tennessee–North Carolina state line and North Carolina mile marker 4, where both east- and westbound lanes of traffic disappear into a tunnel, bore the brunt of the destruction. In some places, the shoulder is gone. In others, one lane crumbled, and in some, both lanes are missing. The road saw significant damage on the Tennessee side of the state line too, with the eastbound lanes damaged in multiple locations from mile 446 to the state line at mile 451.

“Because of the alignment of the river versus the road coming in from an angle, the water got in behind walls,” explained Wanda Payne, Division 14 engineer for NCDOT. “And so once it got behind those walls, it just ate out the dirt. It’s like ‘between a rock and a hard place,’ except our hard place wasn’t as hard as we thought it was, so the rock won.”

In the most-affected areas of I-40, entire lanes of highway were carried away, as was the soil on which they once rested. Photo provided by NCDOT.

The highway between Maggie Valley and the state line has been closed since the storm as NCDOT develops plans for both emergency stabilization and long-term repair, while the adjoining five miles in Tennessee are open only as a two-lane road for local, noncommercial traffic. As of February 10, there were still 172 road closures in effect across North Carolina, with roughly 8,000 sites damaged, including at least 140 bridges in need of replacement. NCDOT continues to chip away at this massive to do list.

“I definitely sympathize with the DOT, because they’re in a position where they feel like they need to be racing ahead to get all these things put back in place, but at the same time, I hope that the public can see the opportunity here,” said Sutherland. “We can make it so that the next time a big storm like Helene comes through, our infrastructure actually survives.”

For this, Sutherland sees Vermont as a role model. Hurricane Irene inflicted massive damage on the state in 2011, and afterward Vermont invested nearly $230 million in 130 infrastructure projects designed to withstand similar weather events in the future. The state saw another round of major flooding in 2023, and those sites were either undamaged or minimally impacted.

Any bridge or culvert that can survive a storm like Helene will need to be “absurdly big and strong,” Sutherland said, ensuring space to install culverts or underpasses large enough for bear, deer, and other animals. Wildlands Network recently completed an analysis of North Carolina bridges damaged by Helene that prioritizes their importance for wildlife connectivity.

Two bobcats climb into a culvert that runs under I-40. They will use the pipe to reach the other side of the highway without crossing traffic. Photo provided by National Parks Conservation Association, Wildlands Network.

“If we’re able to put in better bridges that are more floodproof and stronger and bigger on even a quarter or half of those sites,” Sutherland said, “that’s going to have huge benefits for wildlife.”

But it’s a time-sensitive issue. The DOT is working to restore the state’s transportation infrastructure as quickly as possible, an undertaking expected to be extremely expensive, even without considering wildlife crossings. The Safe Passage group is working hard to offer planners its input and help secure funding for installations that could benefit wildlife for generations to come.

“If we miss this opportunity, then Hurricane Helene could have the counterintuitive result of foreclosing on the likelihood for wildlife improvements at hundreds of sites over the next 50 years,” Sutherland said. “Who will want to tear out shiny new bridges and culverts?”

NCDOT structures destroyed by Helene had an average age of 60, meaning that many of them would have been up for replacement in the coming years. Losing the opportunity to improve their utility for wildlife post-Helene would be a “serious setback,” Sutherland said.

The Pigeon River Gorge continues to be a top priority for Safe Passage. The area damaged by Helene includes four sites in Tennessee and three in North Carolina that the research from Wildlands Network and NPCA flagged for wildlife-crossing concerns. In any highway project, rerouting traffic comprises a significant percentage of the budget—but if wildlife-crossing structures could be dropped in while the road is still closed, these improvements could be made with less hassle or expense than will likely be possible again anytime soon.

Safe Passage’s earlier efforts to coordinate with transportation planners have paved the way to make such an outcome more likely than it would have been prior to the group’s formation—Payne said that NCDOT’s plans will address wildlife concerns mentioned in the report. But what that repair might look like is still an open question. In many places, the entire bedrock on which the road rested is gone. NCDOT may decide against rebuilding I-40 exactly as it was before.

Due to potential difficulty in securing reimbursement from the Federal Highway Administration, it’s unlikely NDOT will choose to reroute the entire corridor. However, realignment within the most-affected area is a possibility, as are walls, viaducts, and bridges. The NCDOT awarded Wright Brothers Construction an $8.5 million contract to perform temporary emergency repairs on the road and had expected to open the westbound lanes for two-way traffic by New Year’s Day. However, that timeline was delayed when a large chunk of concrete fell from one of the eastbound lanes, NCDOT announced December 20. The road is now expected to accommodate two-way traffic starting March 1, with a speed limit of 40 miles per hour.   Tennessee is working to reopen all lanes of I-40 in its jurisdiction by the end of the year, and NCDOT expects to do so by October 2026. It has hired Ames Construction as contractor, RK&K as designer, and HNTB as project manager. Payne wants all three parties to meet with Safe Passage early in the process to discuss how wildlife crossings should factor into the design.

Rebuild stronger infrastructure now so NC can save later, featured in Raleigh News & Observer

By Ron Southerland

The Pigeon River damaged or destroyed the eastbound lanes of Interstate 40 in several places after the remnants of Hurricane Helene dropped historic amounts of rain on Western North Carolina. This photo was taken about four miles from the Tennessee line. Photo courtesy of NCDOT.

When Vermont was hit by Hurricane Irene in 2011, its infrastructure was shattered, just as ours in North Carolina is now. Someone up there had the wisdom to make sure every culvert, bridge and building that was destroyed was replaced by a version that was bigger, stronger and more resilient to flooding. I suggest North Carolina take the same approach, with substantial support from the federal government and our own General Assembly. It may be expensive up front but provides significant savings and much faster recovery from storms down the road.

Read the full Raleigh News & Observer feature here.

Creating Safe Passage, featured in Blue Ridge Outdoors

By Holly Kays

Photo by Michele Sons.

Extensive efforts to add highway wildlife crossings near the Smokies aim to protect animals and people

Editor’s Note: This story was published in the October issue of Blue Ridge Outdoors before Hurricane Helene devastated portions of western North Carolina and surrounding areas. Due to extensive flood damage on Interstates 40 and 26, the Safe Passage Fund Coalition is adapting its ongoing work to include assessing the affects of the storm to recently installed crossing improvements and working to collaborate with environmental and government partners to prioritize animal and human safety as these highways are being repaired and rebuilt.

By 10 p.m., interstate 40 was dark and deserted as North Carolina State Representative Sarah Crawford and her husband Dan cruised east past Morganton, N.C. They were eager to reach their hotel for some rest between the wedding they’d just attended and the comedy show and baseball game planned for the next day. 

Then the car stopped “like we had hit a brick wall,” said Sarah Crawford, a Wake County representative in the North Carolina General Assembly. 

In fact, they’d hit a 200-pound bear. Every air bag deployed, the front fender crumpled, and the car was left motionless in the dark—on a road where most people drive 70 miles per hour or more. Though the couple managed to escape mostly unscathed, the car was totaled, and the bear was dead.

It was a “pretty scary incident” that sent Crawford “down a rabbit hole” searching for information about how to make roads safer for both human travelers and native wildlife. That journey led her directly to the Safe Passage coalition, a group of people and organizations that has been working since 2017 to make wildlife crossings safer not only in its focus area of the Pigeon River Gorge, but also in hotspots across North Carolina and Tennessee. 

“We at Safe Passage often use the tagline, ‘what’s good for wildlife is good for people,’” said Tim Gestwicki, the coalition’s steering committee chair and CEO of the North Carolina Wildlife Federation. “And clearly, if they run into a large animal, the danger is there for people too. So it’s a perfect nexus of people and wildlife safety.”

Photo courtesy of NPCA/Wildlands Network.

Over the years, Safe Passage has become an increasingly organized collaborative of dedicated partners involved in everything from transportation planning to educational outreach and lobbying efforts—work that is predicated on foundational research it conducted starting in 2018. Coalition partners Wildlands Network and National Parks Conservation Association hired researchers Liz Hillard and Steve Goodman to tackle the project, and the pair placed 120 cameras along the 28-mile Pigeon River Gorge corridor. This stretch of Interstate 40 straddles the North Carolina-Tennessee line, bisecting a rugged landscape that falls mostly within either the Pisgah National Forest, Cherokee National Forest, or Great Smoky Mountains National Park. 

View the full Blue Ridge Outdoors feature here.

Crosby helped inspire ‘A Search for Safe Passage,’ allusions to his lyrics made throughout the book

Legendary singer-songwriter David Crosby passed away on Jan. 19, 2023, at age 81. In addition to his solo career, he was a founding member of both the Byrds and Crosby, Stills and Nash (and sometimes Young).

Crosby’s music influenced Great Smoky Mountains Association’s creative director Frances Figart in writing the award-winning title “A Search for Safe Passage.” Set in a microcosm of the Pigeon River Gorge and featuring 19 species that collaborate to find a safe way to cross the road, the book is geared for young readers but offers a plethora of humor and significance for adults who love literature and music.

“David Crosby’s haunting post-apocalyptic anthem ‘Wooden Ships’ became the soundtrack for my creative work,” Figart (which rhymes with Tiger) writes in an essay about her influences that appears at the end of the book. In the song, two groups of desolate people from opposite sides of a war encounter each other after the destruction has rendered them weak and nearly dead—and some don’t even know who won!

“The song began to represent for me a dreadful future when we have lost our iconic Appalachian species to our own blindness and apathy—a time when humans would say to the few remaining individual bear, deer, and elk:

Horror grips us as we watch you die
All we can do is echo your anguished cries

And the animals would reply:
We are leaving, you don’t need us.

Oh, but we do need them!”

“A Search for Safe Passage” alludes to “Wooden Ships”in several ways.

Since the animal territory in the gorge is now divided by the highway into the North and South, those on the North side believe that the ones in the South have shinier coats because they live nearer to the river. So, Deer says to Bobcat in Chapter 4, “I can see by your coat, my friend, you’re from the other side.”

David Crosby’s haunting post-apocalyptic anthem “Wooden Ships” is alluded to in several different ways throughout “A Search for Safe Passage.”

Later, at the end of Chapter 6, Hawk catches “a fair wind blowing warm out of the south” and “sets a course” like the narrator at the end of “Wooden Ships.”

Then, in Chapter 7, Skunk asks Opossum a famous question from the song: “Hey, can I have some of your purple berries?”

And in Firefly’s final poem, the lines “free and easy,” and “the way it’s supposed to be,” also come from “Wooden Ships.” Firefly’s poem actually satirically combines Crosby’s lyrics with some from Samuel Francis Smith’s “America (My Country, ‘Tis of Thee).”

Figart finally alludes to the influence of Croz with the moniker “Human Highway,” the name of a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young album that was never published.

“David was one of my many muses, and his voice never faltered even as he made four solo albums in his 70s,” she said. “Many will miss him, and his spirit and influence will live on in the music that captivated several generations.”

You can purchase the book here to read more about wildlife crossings as well as Figart’s creative influences and allusions.

In the News: Berea College Magazine publishes ‘A Search for Safe Passage’ author reflection

In a December article for Berea College Magazine, “A Search for Safe Passage” author and Berea alumna Frances Figart reflected on all that led up to her work advocating for safe wildlife crossings in the Pigeon River Gorge and beyond.

In the article, Figart recalled that, as a child growing up in eastern Kentucky, she often created “books” for her parents with protagonists like foxes, bobcats, raccoons and opossums. “The only sadness I recall was seeing these wild creatures killed by vehicles on our narrow, winding country roads,” she wrote.

Folding her lifelong passion for protecting animals into her job, Figart supported her employer, Great Smoky Mountains Association, in joining other organizations to create what would become the Safe Passage Fund Coalition.

Around that same time, during the COVID-19 lockdown, Figart thought: “Why not create a story you would have loved to read with your parents as an 11-year-old in the mountains of eastern Kentucky?”

To read the full article in Berea College Magazine, click here.

“A Search for Safe Passage” was written by Frances Figart, pictured, and illustrated by Emma Oxford.

Published by Great Smoky Mountains Association in 2021 and tied to the mission of the Safe Passage Fund Coalition, “A Search for Safe Passage” tells the story of best friends Bear and Deer who grew up together in a beautiful Appalachian gorge, though their home is now divided in two by a dangerous Human Highway. Geared toward readers age 7-13, the book features 19 species of wildlife found in Southern Appalachia and includes an additional nonfiction section with educational lessons about animal habitat requirements, behavior, migration patterns, and roadway ecology problems and solutions developed with input from both international and local experts. 

Great Smoky Mountains Association releases ‘A Search for Safe Passage’ to teach young readers about wildlife crossings

Press Release from Great Smoky Mountains Association:

GATLINBURG, TN — Great Smoky Mountains Association is pleased to announce the publication of “A Search for Safe Passage,” an educational adventure for readers ages seven to 13 written by Frances Figart and illustrated by Emma DuFort.

“A Search for Safe Passage” tells the story of best friends Bear and Deer who grew up together on the North side of a beautiful Appalachian gorge. In the time of their grandparents, animals could travel freely on either side of a fast-flowing river, but now the dangerous Human Highway divides their home range into the North and South sides. On the night of a full moon, two strangers arrive from the South with news that will lead to tough decisions, a life-changing adventure, and new friends joining in a search for safe passage.

“Frances’ new book is a very accessible introduction to the problems and solutions associated with highways, traffic, and wildlife,” said Senior Research Ecologist Marcel Huijser (pronounced ‘Houser’) with the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University in Bozeman. “Through easily understandable stories of the animal characters, we learn that a busy highway can be a barrier to the search for food, water, mates, and new areas to live.”

The book is closely connected to Safe Passage: The I-40 Pigeon River Gorge Wildlife Crossing Project, a new road mitigation campaign in Western North Carolina and East Tennessee. It includes an additional nonfiction section with educational lessons about animal habitat requirements, behavior, migration patterns, and road ecology problems and solutions developed with input from international and local experts.

Figart’s passion to get involved with this cause began as a teenager in the Appalachian foothills in Eastern Kentucky not long after learning how to drive. After running over a snake on the way to work one day, she was so devastated she returned home, called in sick, and cried for hours.

“Today, each time I see a dead creature along the roadway, deep down I still react like that teenager who was devastated by one individual death,” said Figart. “I simply refuse to accept roadkill as a natural part of traveling in a mountainous region, and I know many others who feel the same way. There are viable and affordable solutions that have succeeded all over the world, and the time has come to do something about this issue in our biologically diverse Southern Appalachian landscape.”

The cover of Frances Figart’s “A Search for Safe Passage,” a chapter book that teaches young readers about wildlife and the “barrier effect” caused by highways, illustrated by Emma DuFort.

After joining Great Smoky Mountains Association as the Creative Services Director in 2017, she got involved with a group of federal, state, tribal, and non-governmental organizations discussing the need for wildlife-crossing structures along Interstate 40 near the park boundary. That group, with GSMA playing a key role, formed Safe Passage: The I-40 Pigeon River Gorge Wildlife Crossing Project.

“When Taylor Barnhill, one of my colleagues on the Safe Passage project, asked me when I was going to write a children’s book about the need for wildlife crossings, at first I protested that I had too many other obligations,” Figart said. “But over the next six weekends, I wrote the eight-chapter book, channeling the 11-year-old kid in me and creating a narrative I would have enjoyed reading with my own mother at that age.”

This is the first children’s book by author Frances Figart and the debut book-length work by illustrator Emma DuFort. Figart also wrote “Seasons of Letting Go: Most of What I Know about Truly Living I Learned by Helping Someone Die.”

“A Search for Safe Passage” is available in the park’s visitor center bookstores and at GSMA’s online store at smokiesinformation.org.