This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2010, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Years of anticipation have yielded to a feverish construction schedule at Utah's Hogle Zoo, where a 3-acre section of the aging Salt Lake City animal park has been cleared to make way for the zoo's most ambitious project ever.
But for a place that is open 363 days a year — and which proudly surpassed the 1-million-visitor mark for the first time last year — the $17 million "Rocky Shores" project will come with unique challenges.
For the next year and a half, Assistant Director Doug Lund and his fellow Hogle employees will work to make sure that the construction effort doesn't hamper his guests' experience at the park. In fact, Lund said, he's hoping to make the big dig part of that experience between now and the spring of 2012, when the diverse arctic exhibit, featuring polar bears, seals, sea lions and river otters, is scheduled to open.
"We think there is going to be a lot of interest in how exhibits like this are created," said Lund.
Could hard-hatted construction crews become as popular to visitors in 2011 as the zoo's cute and clumsy baby elephant, Zuri, was in 2010? Lund is hoping so. While many amusement parks try to hide new construction with hedges and fences, a long chain link fence along Hogle's northwest quadrant offers a panoramic view of the construction area — and viewing opportunities will continue through the construction schedule.
Right now, the area is little more than a dirt patch. But as crews begin to build — likely in the next few weeks — Lund and education curator Chris Schmitz will work together to provide visitors opportunities to learn about how the project, funded by Salt Lake County voters through a 2008 bond measure, is taking shape.
That will be good practice for the future. While all of the zoo's exhibits have educational features — signs noting facts and figures about the park's nearly 250 species, mainly — the Rocky Shores exhibit is being designed to fulfill an immersive educational mission.
And Schmitz believes that mission couldn't be more important. She recently returned from a trip sponsored by Polar Bears International to Churchill, Canada, where she came face-to-face with the ever-shrinking Western Hudson Bay population of polar bears.
Each spring, the layer of ice that covers the bay and provides the bears their primary hunting grounds has shrunk a little faster. And the long-studied Hudson bears are showing the strains of habitat loss. The bears' body mass and length are falling. The population has declined by a quarter in the past 30 years.
From thousands of miles away, Schmitz said, the problems can seem very remote.
"But when you're up close and personal," she said. "You can see things in a different way."
To that end, the new exhibit will feature above- and below-water observation areas that will allow visitors to get as close to the zoo's big white bears as she was in Manitoba.
For Schmitz, an important part of the exhibit will be its conservation message. And to that end, Hogle officials say, they're walking the talk, starting with the way they're building. Ninety-six percent of the demolition materials were recycled, the zoo has reported.
Expanding the zoo
"Rocky Shores" is slated to open in the spring of 2012. It is part of the planned improvements funded by a $33 million bond approved by county taxpayers in 2008; the zoo raised $11 million.