Motorists should be on the lookout for big game on the move at this time of the year, game biologist says
A Black Gold Transport ore-hauling truck wrecked Friday night after it hit a bison on the Alaska Highway about 20 miles southeast of Delta Junction.
Alaska State Troopers say they got a report at around 10:30 p.m. Friday about an accident with injuries that occurred near milepost 1404. According to a trooper dispatch, the driver lost control after hitting a bison, and the truck went into the ditch and wound up on its side.
The dispatch said emergency personnel had to remove the driver, who was trapped inside the truck. The driver was then transported to a hospital in Fairbanks for evaluation and treatment.
A spokesperson for Kinross Alaska said the driver was later released from Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, and is OK. Kinross is a mining company that contracts with North Pole-based Black Gold Transport to truck ore from the Manh Choh mine near Tetlin to the mill at the Fort Knox mine north of Fairbanks.
The spokesperson said the northbound truck was fully loaded with gold ore from the Manh Choh. The ore was later recovered and transported to the mill.
The ore-hauling operation has run into pushback since it began in 2023, in part because safety advocates were concerned about an increase in wrecks involving the trucks on public highways.
Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Ellie Mason says the bison often are on the move around the area, where the State Bison Range and several farms are located.
“ They mill around in there," she said in an interview Tuesday. "They can go back and forth kind of at any time, right, between the bison range and the ag projects, which are north of the highway.”
Mason, who's based in Delta Junction, says the bison travel back and forth year-round between the range and their calving grounds on the banks of the Delta River west of Fort Greely.
“Most of them start moving north right around this time," she said, "but for the rest of the year, you know, through the winter, they can move back and forth in between those two areas and cross the highway fairly consistently, but not predictably.”
She says bison aren’t the only animals that range along the highways around this time of year.
“ The moose start moving, the bison start moving, the weather starts changing. And the other thing is it's starting to get dark again, right? And that’s when those kinda twilight hours is the time that we're starting to have more animal-vehicle collisions.”
Mason says the bison involved in the collision appeared to be a fully grown female, and probably weighed about 900 pounds. The Kinross spokesperson said volunteers later salvaged the meat.
According to troopers, the Alaska Highway was closed briefly in both directions while emergency personnel removed wreckage from the roadway. Both lanes were later reopened.
