Washington’s big-game corridors cross the Cascades, the Methow, the Chelan country and the Selkirks. The state contains the dataset’s only mapped white-tailed deer migration, in the Selkirk Mountains. This map shows every USGS-mapped big-game migration corridor in Washington — 7 herd units, 224 GPS-collared animals, and 693 tracked migration segments, recorded between 2009 and 2022.
Click any corridor or stopover for herd-level stats. Toggle species on and off in the controls above the map, or pick a featured corridor lower on the page to load real GPS tracks onto the map.
Big-game migration in Washington by the numbers
- 7 mapped herd units
- 224 individual animals tracked by GPS collar
- 693 GPS migration tracks recorded between 2009 and 2022
- 12,282 km² of migration corridor identified
- 7 stopovers — critical rest and refuel sites along the corridors
Species tracked in Washington
- Mule Deer — 4 herd units mapped in Washington
- Elk — 2 herd units mapped in Washington
- White-tailed Deer — 1 herd unit mapped in Washington
Every tracked herd unit in Washington
The complete list of USGS-mapped herd units that include Washington. Cross-border herds shared with neighbouring states are included.
- Elk: Colockum herd — 35 tracked animals, 2009–2012
- Elk: Pend Oreille herd — 0 tracked animals, —
- Mule Deer: Chelan herd — 0 tracked animals, —
- Mule Deer: Klickitat herd — 32 tracked animals, 2021–2022
- Mule Deer: Methow herd — 98 tracked animals, 2017–2020
- Mule Deer: Wenatchee Mountains herd — 59 tracked animals, 2020–2022
- White-tailed Deer: Selkirk herd — 0 tracked animals, —
What threatens migration corridors in Washington
Across the West, the biggest threats to big-game migrations are not the things that kill individual animals — they’re the things that fragment the corridor itself. Energy development, road crossings, fences and subdivision of winter range have all been documented as drivers of corridor loss in this dataset. State wildlife agencies, the USGS Corridor Mapping Team, and conservation NGOs are now using maps like this one to guide decisions about where to build wildlife crossings, where to replace woven-wire fences, and where to prioritise conservation easements on private winter range.
Explore further
This page is part of MapScaping’s western big-game migration series. See the Western US Big Game Migration Map for the complete dataset across all ten states, or browse a different state:
