ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, March 10, 1997 TAG: 9703110002
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RUPERT CUTLER
ONE ASPECT of the development plan for Virginia's Explore Park on which a strong consensus is yet to emerge is the theme or focus of the zoo there. A zoo has been long planned to occupy the Bedford County section of the park on the other side of the Roanoke River from Explore's rapidly developing and popular Blue Ridge settlement/fort/Indian village historic interpretation area. A zoo always has been at the core of the Explore Park concept.
Early advocates of Explore, knowing how popular zoos are as tourist attractions, wanted Roanoke to have a large, high-quality zoo. At first, it was planned to be located on the now-closed regional landfill. That was before Explore planners were made aware that uses of the retired landfill would be strictly limited to those unlikely to penetrate the fragile clay cap that separates the decomposing trash from the rest of the environment.
There has long been concern about the limited acreage available to the Mill Mountain Zoo. Regardless of the success of its efforts to provide higher-quality environments for both its captive animals and the visiting public - and substantial progress is being made in this regard - the zoo on Mill Mountain faces a relatively small, finite limit to both its animal-display area and its car-parking capacity.
Personally, I favor prompt implementation of the outstanding plan for the Mill Mountain Zoo prepared years ago by local landscape architect David Hill.
Hill's plan would turn the mountaintop zoo into an oriental garden featuring Asian wildlife species such as red pandas, white-necked cranes, and - yes - Siberian tigers and snow leopards, in a landscape setting of reflecting ponds, arched bridges, formal stepping-stone trails, and colorful trees and flower beds - a unique aesthetic treat potentially as appealing as the famous Butchart Gardens near Victoria, British Columbia, which are visited by millions every year. Little more space than is currently occupied by the zoo would be needed for such a jewel-like tourist attraction and wildlife conservation and education center.
I don't propose moving the rest of the Mill Mountain Zoo's - or the world's - wildlife cast to Explore Park, however. There are relatively few places left in the Eastern states suitable for replicating such extensive habitats as the African veldt, the Eurasian steppes, or even the North American prairie. North Carolina, in the relatively flat Piedmont country near Asheboro, just two hours away, already has done that, at considerable public expense. It would be difficult to replicate lifelike pronghorn or desert bighorn sheep exhibits, not to mention giraffe or elephant habitat, in Explore's steep, forested, river gorge topography.
What Explore's original zoo-design consultants, Jones and Jones Inc. of Seattle, proposed in the mid-'80s was an "American Wilderness Park" zoo concept for the north side of the Roanoke River. That's when Explore's leadership thought Al Hammond and Louis Bass would sell Explore their farms on the west and east ends of Explore's holdings on the Bedford County side of the river. But for good reasons of their own, they did not. So Explore Park is about 300 acres shy of the land base for the zoo Jones and Jones had in mind. (Explore still has about 400 acres to work with there.)
Jones and Jones offered project director Bern Ewert a plan that included enclosed habitats for a wide variety of North American wildlife species, accessible by a tram so that the visiting public would move from replicas of one geographic/ecological area of this continent to another as though they were on photo safari, seeing groups of animals in close-to-natural surroundings. The plan called for wild animal groupings representing ecosystems in "Old Virginia", the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest and even the arid Southwest. Structures needed to house animals or for other purposes were to have been constructed to resemble Native American homes and council lodges typical of those regions.
Early in my tenure as park executive director, I dropped the notion of keeping desert species here and began to refer to Explore's planned zoo as an attempt "to replicate the wildlife-viewing experiences of the Lewis and Clark Expedition."
But as time has passed and all of us associated with the park have scratched our heads and wondered how to proceed with the Explore Park zoo plan, the zoo part of the Explore program has remained a "black hole" devoid of realistic content. Support for a massive public investment in an Explore Park zoo such as has been made at the North Carolina Zoo - we're looking at a cost of more than $50 million - will be hard to find.
Because Explore did not acquire the Hammond farm, its Bedford County holdings are not contiguous to the Blue Ridge Parkway, to which another public road connection on the north side of the Roanoke River would have to be made to handle heavy zoo traffic. The lands Explore does own in Bedford County are steep and wooded, and don't lend themselves to certain envisaged Western habitats. But they are truly beautiful wildlands ideal for hiking, nature study ... and enclosures for Eastern North America's wildlife species.
Here's how I suggest Explore proceed with its zoo:
Treat it as the fifth historic time period within Explore's "living history museum" mission - the earliest one of all. Explore now interprets four historic time periods:
The late 1800s, with an 1880 Botetourt County church, eventually to be accompanied by an 1880 Giles County minister's home.
The mid-1800s, showing settlers in an extensive, farming-based 1850 Blue Ridge community, with a one-room school and, soon, a Franklin County grist mill.
The mid-1700s, with long hunters in a replica palisaded frontier fort, log cabins and sutler's store.
1000 years ago, by means of a unique and accurate replica of a Roanoke River-bank Monacan Indian village.
I suggest Explore Park use its Bedford County land to provide the public with an exhibit of life in Western Virginia as it was 10, 000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age (the Pleistocene Era, to geologists), in which human beings, known to have been here in small numbers, take a back seat to wildlife. Because evolution and ecological change take place so slowly, it would be relatively easy to replicate the ecological situation here 10,000 years ago by bringing into Explore Park living examples of animal species that have been extirpated here but still run wild elsewhere in the world (farther north!).
The human element should be included, with the help of scientists from the Virginia Museum of Natural History. On the north side of the Roanoke River within the boundaries of Explore Park are sites similar to those used by families of prehistoric hominids. It would be challenging to replicate the cave-homes and campfire sites of those early forebears of ours. There are firms that make human models for anthropology museums to provide the skin-clothed three-dimensional human images.
But the main thrust and principal draw of this "fifth dimension" of Explore Park would be the live wildlife of prehistoric western Virginia - "Pleistocene Park."
True, we can't include some Pleistocene fauna, such as mammoths, mastodons and ground sloths. They've become extinct, together with the passenger pigeons and Carolina paroquets. Certainly, though, musk oxen and caribou - perhaps even wild horses similar to those that once ranged here long before the Spanish conquered Mexico - can be obtained and shown, as well as gray wolves, red wolves, mountain lions, Iynx, bison, elk and many other now-rare or locally extinct mammalian and avian species. Paleozoologists at the Virginia Museum of Natural History and Smithsonian Institution/National Zoo experts can provide technical recommendations. Explore could contract with the Blue Ridge Zoological Society (Mill Mountain Zoo) to care for the animals.
In my view, this would be a way to use all of Explore Park as an outdoor living-history museum, ending the concern on the part of the park's current historical-interpretation staff that some day an alien program called a zoo will swallow up the park's popular and well-established living-history interpretation program and its yet-to-be-
implemented environmental education program. Together with the Gardens of the Orient Zoo on Mill Mountain, Explore's live replication of the Ice Age in the Blue Ridge would bring curious visitors to Roanoke from around the world.
RUPERT CUTLER was executive director of Virginia's Explore Park from 1991 until February, and is now the executive director of the Western Virginia Land Trust, headquartered in Roanoke.
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