A Coyote Was the First Animal Onto the Liberty Canyon Wildlife Bridge

One design out of the 5 November briefs, and it is a quiet one. No record broken, nothing on fire, nobody holding a trophy. Just an animal walking somewhere it could not walk before, photographed at six in the morning by a camera nobody was watching.

Liberty Canyon, California

For sixty years the ten lanes of the Ventura Freeway have run through the Santa Monica Mountains like a wall. That is the thing people tend to miss about a big road: for the animals on either side of it, it is not a road at all, it is the edge of the world. Coyotes, bobcats, deer and mountain lions have spent six decades on one side or the other, breeding with the same small pool of neighbours, because the alternative was ten lanes of traffic.

A bridge has been going up over those lanes at Liberty Canyon, near Agoura Hills, to put the two halves back together. It is 200 feet long and 165 feet wide, planted with native brush so that it reads as hillside rather than as structure, and it has been under construction since 2022. It does not open until December. The National Park Service has been installing cameras on it in the meantime, and this week they released the first thing one of them caught.

A coyote. Walking up onto the span on its own, just after six in the morning, the first large mammal recorded using the crossing. In the actual photograph it nearly disappears - a grey shape on a dark slope, one eye catching the infrared. The crossing, properly the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, was built with mountain lions in mind, and a mountain lion will presumably turn up eventually. But the coyote got there first, before the ribbon, before anyone said it was allowed.

That is the part worth putting on a hat. Not the engineering, not the price tag - the fact that the first visitor did not wait for the opening.

The Painted Coyote Trucker Hat is a departure for this series. Everything in Hot Off the Press until now has been a patch - embroidered, metal, wood, leather. This one is a full-colour transfer, printed and pressed straight onto the cap front, which let the coyote stay a painting: greys and warm tans and rust running through the fur, an amber eye, brushwork still visible across the shoulder and the ruff at the neck. It prints large, roughly four inches across the front panel, so the animal reads at the size it deserves rather than shrinking into a badge. No lettering anywhere on it.

It comes on the Richardson 112 in five colorways plus an Infinity Charlie ponytail cap in Dusty Rose and White. Made to order.

Shop the Painted Coyote Trucker Hat →

One from this batch

A short drop this time - a single design, and a good one to be short on. If the coyote is the one you want, it is here: the Painted Coyote Trucker Hat — Liberty Canyon, California.