He never gained the notoriety and fame of P-22, but this unnamed big cat was a driving force behind the world’s largest wildlife crossing — the size of a football field — being built over 10 lanes of the 101 Ventura Freeway at Liberty Canyon in Agoura Hills right now.
Nobody gave much thought to wildlife in the 1960s when the freeway was extended north, effectively cutting off the passageway east and west to Pacific Coast Highway for mountain lions, bobcats, foxes, and all wildlife that had roamed the land freely for centuries.
Los Angeles was expanding. We needed to move cars, not wildlife. If mountain lions were forced to fight among themselves to survive in a limited space, and they had to inbreed because they could not mate with their species on the other side of the freeway, so be it.
It was a small price to pay to keep traffic moving on California’s longest freeway where today more than 300,000 cars a day pass by the wildlife crossing construction site at Liberty Canyon.
Maybe that’s what we should name the forgotten mountain lion that spurred this crossing. Liberty. He was certainly looking for it when he made a break in 2013.
“He had made it all the way across the freeway, but when he got to the other side he couldn’t get up the steep walls that Caltrans had built between Agoura Road and the freeway,” said former California state Senator Fran Pavley.
“So, he turned around to go back and got hit by a car and was killed. That was like a wake-up call. I had a meeting in my district office and invited the local superintendent of national parks, the head of Caltrans in the Los Angeles area, and other government officials all in one room.
“What should we do, I asked them? That’s where it all started. What should we do?”
If construction keeps on schedule, the $90 million answer will open in 2025. Wildlife on both sides of the 101 Freeway will be reunited on land that stretches from the 118 Freeway to the 101 to Pacific Coast Highway.
There’s…
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