NICK SCHRIVER looks at highways the way a contractor looks at your house. He sees trouble spots that can use some touch-ups, if not total reconstructions. The maintenance supervisor for the Montana Department of Transportation’s northeast field office, Schriver is tasked with making sure roads in his district are intact and as safe as intended.
His is no office job. Instead, Schriver drives a thousand miles of two-lane in his MDT pickup at least once a week, noting damaged signs, crumbling asphalt, plugged culverts, and roadkill. Always roadkill. His district includes some of the gamiest landscapes in North America, swaths of open prairie that pronghorn antelope cross on their thousand-year-old seasonal migrations, riverbottoms full of whitetails, and Hi-Line two-lanes dotted with grazing mule deer.
Schriver takes me on a tour of the most problematic areas in his district, spots where roadside vegetation grows right up to the shoulder, obscuring wildlife. Or stretches where the terrain funnels migrating antelope into just a few hundred yards of blacktop.
“Here’s one where I bet we’ve picked up dozens, maybe even hundreds, of dead deer over the years,” says Schriver, stopping on the narrow shoulder on the east side of Nashua, a little town on U.S. Highway 2 between the prairie oases of Glasgow and Wolf Point. “Mix of whitetails and muleys, and the occasional antelope in bad winters when the snow pushes them onto the highway. The only reason more deer aren’t killed here is because the speed limit is still 55” coming out of the city limits.
On one side of the highway, Porcupine Creek meanders through groves of shady ash trees. On the other side stands a winter wheat field. It’s a classic transition zone between cover and feed, and Schriver says that for motorists who aren’t