A Crossing of Their Own Colorado civil engineer John Kronholm ’93 helps all manner of animals get to the other side of dangerous highways —BY KATE LAWLESS
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s a child growing up in rural Blandford, Massachusetts, John Kronholm ’93 loved the outdoors. He built dams in the driveway when it rained, he loved camping with his scout troop, and he pored longingly over the pages of Ski Magazine. After two years at Williston, he attended Union College, double majoring in civil engineering and geology. “To me, that path between engineering and connection to the land was civil engineering,” he said from his office in Eagle, Colorado, where he’s a Design Team Manager at the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT). For the past
10 years, among other projects, he’s been working to create overpasses and underpasses for wildlife crossing state highways. Kronholm began his career in Virginia, but it wasn’t long before he took off to Colorado in 1999, bound for big mountains covered in powder. Around that time, Coloradans were seeing more animals hit by vehicles on highways. Two endangered
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Canada lynx were killed following the reintroduction of the species there. State agencies and conservation groups were realizing that major roads were making it difficult for wildlife to complete their migrations, and that the reduction of their habitat, so fragmented by human development and infrastructure, was impacting biodiversity. Road ecology became a movement to create highway crossings for wildlife.
Kronholm saw that he could be part of the solution in 2016 as the Project Manager of an environmental assessment of Vail Pass. He’s currently working on crossings under that stretch of Interstate 70, which passes through the Eagle Valley amid the Rocky Mountains. There, he set up trail cameras, trying to find the areas where iconic Western fauna cross the road—animals such as Canada lynx, mule deer, pronghorn, bighorn
