Highway twinning project boon for anglers

New Trans-Canada Highway underpasses improve fish habitat

BANFF NATIONAL PARK — If you’ve driven the TransCanada Highway in Banff National Park, you may feel safer now that it’s twinned all the way to the British Columbia boundary.

You’ve may have noticed the fence along the roadway and the wildlife overpasses overhead, but there’s a good chance you haven’t thought about the fish swimming in the creeks below it.

“Most people will just pass right over,” Melanie Kwong, superintendent for Lake Louise, Yoho and Kootenay national parks, said Friday as she stood near Bath Creek below the Trans-Canada Highway west of Lake Louise for an event marking the completion of the twinning project.

“The overpasses are well known, but the underpasses you don’t get a chance to see very often.

“It’s really a story about connectivity.”

The final 35 kilometres of the $317-million project includes highway fencing, four wildlife overpasses and 18 wildlife underpasses from Castle Junction to the west gate of Banff National Park.

“The goals of this project were to improve motorist safety, to reduce highway wildlife mortality, reconnect habitat and improve the flow of goods and services on Canada’s national highway,” said Conservative MP Blake Richards, who represents the federal Alberta riding of Wild Rose.

It is projected the twinned highway will reduce fatal vehicle collisions by 80 per cent and all wildlife-vehicle collisions by 80 per cent.

It will also improve wildlife and fish habitat throughout the park.

Shelley Humphries, aquatics specialist with Banff, Yoho and Kootenay national parks, said the mitigation work around Bath Creek was the best in the Trans-Canada Highway twinning project.

“The culvert that used to be here that was taken out two years ago was one of the worst culverts in Banff National Park,” she said.

“It was only four meters wide so it was really undersized, but this creek is about 10-12 meters wide normally so the water really had to constrict to come in and the velocity was really tremendous.

“It was slanted inside and it had a big outfall drop.”

As a result, Humphries said fish coming out of the Bow River could only access the lower part of Bath Creek.

“They couldn’t get up into this upper section, they were alienated from about 13 kilometres of stream,” she said, noting there was only two species of fish: Bull trout and brook trout.

Once the culvert was removed, fish had unimpeded movement in the creek — an important tributary to the Bow River.

“A couple of weeks ago, we came back and caught four species of fish,” said Humphries, noting they found whitefish. “We were completely elated to find westslope cutthroat trout as well.”