BETH: I didn't believe it at first.

I was like, there's no way a mountain lion is living in the middle of Los Angeles.

He was from this area, the central Santa Monica Mountains.

Made an impossible journey across this freeway to find a new home in Griffith Park.

He lived there for 10 years and showed what was possible with coexistence.

His story is what really got this monumental wildlife crossing built.

If LA can build the world's largest wildlife crossing, what excuse does anywhere else have?

♪ ♪ There's something about an animal that's held on from the ice age.

So many of the animals from that time, giant sloths and saber tooths, they're gone.

♪ NARRATOR: Mountain lions once roamed across the Americas and picked up many names along the way- puma, cougar, panther, catamount.

♪ But for the past few centuries, mountain lions were demonized as a threat and hunted to near-extinction east of the Mississippi.

♪ ♪ They're holding on in open areas of the West, but human development is shrinking their remaining territory and even forcing them into urban areas including the heart of Los Angeles.

♪ BETH: Most of my career was spent in parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone, places where wildlife in my mind should be.

♪ NARRATOR: But then Beth met Jeff Sikich, a wildlife biologist who works in the parklands just west of LA.

♪ BETH: He drove me around, showed me the freeways and how the mountain lions were going to go extinct if we didn't do something.

NARRATOR: Without improved connectivity, scientists say there is nearly one-in-four chance that the local mountain lion population will go extinct in the next 50 years.

♪ JEFF: We've been doing research for two decades now here in the Santa Monica Mountains.

And we've been collecting a lot of data from mountain lions, (camera clicks) bobcats, coyote and deer, (camera clicks) lizards, and bird species.

(camera clicks) NARRATOR: Surrounded by the Pacific Coast, two massive freeways and agricultural fields, wildlife here is largely bound inside the park.

(ground squirrel squeaks) BETH: You cut off the Santa Monica Mountains from the entire rest of the world when the 101 went in.

JEFF: They are trapped in this island of habitat.

(mountain lion lapping water) NARRATOR: A single male mountain lion needs about one hundred square miles to hunt and find a mate.

♪ JEFF: The greatest challenge for mountain lions and other wildlife, but in particular mountain lions because they require huge amounts of space, is the fragmentation of these natural areas.

NARRATOR: If their territory gets too small, mating becomes an unhealthy family affair.

JEFF: This very close inbreeding leads to very low genetic diversity.

Our small population here has some of the lowest genetic diversity ever recorded.

NARRATOR: That can lead to physical defects, a genetic warning sign, and ultimately, the inability to reproduce.

♪ ♪ As boxed in as the Santa Monica Mountains are, one mountain lion got out, only to find himself in an even more precarious spot.

♪ P-22, the 22nd local puma radio collared by biologists in 2012, grew up by the coast.

♪ BETH: When he came of age, he did what a mountain lion needed to do, which is go find my own home.

(car honking) NARRATOR: The young cat braved LA's notorious freeways in search of more space.

(car honking) ♪ BETH: He made it somehow!

Successfully crossed the 405 and the 101, makes it to Griffith Park, which hadn't seen a mountain lion in decades.

I just love that this cat who doesn't like to be seen, still makes it in such an urban and exposed place like Los Angeles.

How can you not root for that?

(stream burbling) ♪ NARRATOR: P-22 had found a small scrap of territory deep inside the city.

But the highways still separate him and his birth place from the larger open ranges to the northwest.

BETH: I said, "Hey," at the end of the day, "Jeff, how can I help?

"You know, I just started my job with the National Wildlife Federation."

and he is like, "Oh, there's this little wildlife crossing we've been trying to get built."

NARRATOR: A crossing to open up a path for all wildlife out of the Santa Monica Mountains.

(camera shutter) Mountain lions are an umbrella species - a creature whose protection benefits many others.

Often, by keeping habitat intact.

BETH: Every animal in the Santa Monica Mountains is gonna benefit from this.

Not only will animals be traveling on top of it, but you'll have monarch butterflies laying their eggs on it.

You'll have western fence lizards making their home, foxes hanging out on it.

♪ NARRATOR: But building what would be the world's largest wildlife crossing requires broad public support and generous funding.

P-22's story became an opportunity.

STEVE: I had this Nat Geo assignment: All we need to really show urban wildlife would be to get a mountain lion with the Hollywood sign.

JEFF: I laughed.

I'm like, "Dude, that's not possible."

He came out anyways.

STEVE: We tried and failed so many times over so many months, and then finally Jeff goes, I think I found the perfect trail, and no people are allowed to walk up there.

♪ NARRATOR: Armed with P-22's GPS collar coordinates and Steve's camera traps, Jeff and Steve tracked the cat for 15 months.

♪ (heavy footsteps) ♪ (bird wings flapping) Finally, their patience paid off.

♪ ♪ (loud camera shutter sound) ♪ BETH: The Steve Winter photo with the Hollywood sign was in National Geographic in 2013, and that's when P-22 went A-lister.

Vocalists singing ♪ welcome to Hollywood ♪ KAITLYN: I think we should take a moment and talk about P-22.

Vocalists singing ♪ welcome to Hollywood ♪ NARRATOR: P-22 soon became, as Beth called him, the Brad Pitt of the mountain lion world.

♪ ♪ ♪ For a decade, he hid in plain sight in a park visited by more than 10 million people a year.

The shy celebrity became the icon of a movement to build the crossing.

♪ ♪ BETH: P-22 really got people like myself to rethink that a freeway is not irredeemable.

We are trying to put a wildlife crossing in an urban area in over one of the busiest freeways in the country.

It's a 10 lane freeway, 300 to 400,000 cars a day in traffic.

NARRATOR: For years, Jeff and his team have used camera traps, radio telemetry, and GPS collars to pinpoint the right spot to build.

JEFF: We have the mountain lions coming up to the freeway on both ends and most animals don't even attempt to cross.

BETH: The animals themselves really are the ones who showed us the way.

Welcome to the groundbreaking for the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing.

NARRATOR: On Earth Day in 2022, the team broke ground on the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing.

ALAN: I want to pray for all the animals.

My tribes, the Chumash, the Tataviam, we are clan people.

We have the eagle clan, the bear clan, the mountain lion clan.

But it's our job to protect them.

We built these roads and these highways; now it's our job to protect them.

MIGUEL: I'm the biologist who had the privilege of discovering P-22 about 10 years ago.

He's arguably the most impactful wildlife story that the conservation community has ever seen.

BETH: This is the 101 freeway, and the crossing is literally gonna extend right over this freeway.

NARRATOR: This critical corridor is the first step in expanding the range of the threatened local mountain lions into the Sierra Madre Mountains and beyond.

BETH: This to me is still a symbol of resiliency and what's possible when both wildlife and people work together.

♪ NARRATOR: With completion expected in 2025, the finished crossing will have vegetated sound walls to dampen traffic noise, deflectors to dim light pollution, and native plants on top.

♪ BETH: This biological stitch on top of it is going to make this ecosystem whole.

NARRATOR: But the same year construction began, tragedy struck.

♪ There was heartbreak across California as news spread that P-22 had been euthanized.

♪ BETH: The cars that he had so successfully evaded for so long in the end doomed him again.

You know, he was pretty seriously hit by a car and it was really devastating.

♪ Nothing prepared me for when we made the announcement.

The outpouring of support from around the world really helped us.

NARRATOR: 6,000 gathered at LA's famous Greek Theater.

Scientists, politicians, celebrities, indigenous leaders, to mourn and celebrate P-22's life together.

♪ BETH: What I did promise him is we would make the world a safer place for his kind and all wildlife and that his death would not be in vain.

NARRATOR: Inspired by the celebration of P-22's life, Beth and her colleagues saw an opportunity to grow the wildlife crossing movement.

♪ Across the United States, studies estimate that one to two million collisions between cars and large animals occur every year, causing over eight billion dollars in damage.

♪ So the team created a fund to support corridor construction across the country.

BETH: You're gonna meet some of the people that were crazy enough to join me...

It's my goal in the next two years to raise $500 million from private philanthropists to help advance these projects quickly.

There are hundreds of projects that could go almost immediately if the funding's just there.

♪ NARRATOR: Cue a cross-country road trip to raise awareness for needed crossings and highlight successful ones.

♪ BETH: We're going to Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, all the states in between and look at projects that are working.

STEVE: We're gonna show wildlife overpasses and underpasses the people involved in them.

TRENT: We are here at the Pelloncillo Mountains.

NEAL: We found three main points where our science is showing that this is where bighorn sheep would cross.

STEVE: And this is just the beginning of a multi-year project.

THOMAS: We get a lot of bobcats, coyotes, javelinas, white-tailed deer, opossums, raccoons.

LAURA: Tucker is an amazing success story.

WILLIAM: We have a couple of panther tracks right here.

DAN: This is addressing, not just individual mortalities, but it's actually reconnected the landscape here.

BETH: We are wildlife, we are part of the same natural system, and we all play integral roles here.

♪ NARRATOR: Stories of icons like P-22, continue to help garner the support and funding that's needed.

♪ BETH: Even if we never saw P-22, to just know that he was there.

There is something that even the most devout city lover loved about that.

The reason this project and P-22 really captured people's imaginations around the world is it's a hopeful one.

This is one we're gonna win.

This is one that we solve the problem.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪