It was just after midnight on April 21st when the radio collar of P-97, an eighteen-month-old mountain lion, sent its last signal. P-97 had only recently separated from his mother, setting out east in the Santa Monica Mountains in search of territory to call his own. (The “P” stands for puma; the number, 97, marks how many mountain lions the National Park Service had tagged when he received the designation.) That night, P-97 reached the 405 freeway, where the parkland of Malibu and Topanga ends and the residential Westside Los Angeles neighborhoods of Brentwood, Bel Air, and Westwood begin. His body was reported to the California Highway Patrol at around one o’clock in the morning, on the southbound side of the 405, near the exit for the Getty Center. His radio collar was missing; his corpse was identified by an ear tag at the West Los Angeles Animal Shelter. Local news broadcasts rolled footage of the black pads of his stilled front paws, a few trails of blood visible on the road behind them.
The following day, a group of nature enthusiasts and dignitaries gathered in a white wedding tent in the suburb of Agoura Hills. The scent of sage smoke wafted over the assembled crowd as it held a moment of silence for P-97, and for all the other mountain lions who have died trying to cross the region’s freeways: P-32, who successfully traversed the 101 only to die crossing the I-5, in 2015; P-61, who successfully crossed ten lanes of the 405 near Sepulveda Pass but was killed trying to make a return trip, in 2019; P-104, who was killed in a hit-and-run on the Pacific Coast Highway in March; and more than a dozen others since the National Park Service began tracking the population, twenty years ago. The occasion of the gathering was a proposed solution: the groundbreaking on the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, a bridge that will be landscaped with native flora and will span the 101, providing safe passage for mountain lions and other wildlife that are hemmed in by the freeways that surround the Santa Monica Mountains; the bridge will guide animals to the wild space and genetic diversity of the Simi Hills, and to the expanse of Los Padres National Forest beyond them, and vice versa. Upon completion—currently scheduled for 2025—it will be the biggest urban wildlife bridge of its kind in the world, and it is intended to serve as a model for other such projects.