Ancient Corridors Symposium a Resounding Success

Top: Meredith Taylor shares migration corridor map. Bottom: Paul Sanders of the Wyoming State Archaeologist's Office discusses the Trapper's Point wildlife migration bottleneck with field-trip participants. Photo by Tory Taylor

More than 120 conservationists, ranchers, hunters and other interested citizens gathered in Pinedale on March 14 and 15 for WOC's Ancient Corridors Symposium and field trip. The event was co-sponsored by the Wyoming Council for the Humanities, the Wyoming Wildlife Federation and the Greater Yellowstone Coalition.

On Friday, archaeologists led a field trip to the Trapper's Point migration bottleneck, where pronghorn were hunted by Native Americans for thousands of years.

Saturday's symposium speakers noted that western Wyoming's big-game migration corridor is one of the world's last remaining long-distance migration routes, and described threats to these ancient paths from oil and gas development, subdivisions and roads. Other speakers discussed promising solutions, including WOC's Restoring Wild Patterns Program and the Wildlife Conservation Society's visionary proposal to designate the pronghorn migration route as a National Migration Corridor.