Wolf Park's New Bridge! Thursday, January 24, 2002   For six years now, Amanda Shaad, Wolf Park's Managing Director, has been working on something special for visitors. For our entire history, to take a full tour of the Park you had to walk about a quarter mile around the main enclosure to see the wolves at Eastlake and then you had to walk all the way back! Now that is not all that bad, but would it not be nicer to be able to continue a walk around back to the fox pen? A loop trail would be ideal. And, we could open up more exhibits!

The main problem is the pond. Something had to get visitors over the pond! Building a bride from scratch is expensive and would have been cost prohibitive to cross the span by the wolf enclosure. Spanning further up would have greatly limited the bison herd's access to open water. Well, fortunately for us, but unfortunately for the company who built it, a defective walk bridge built in 2000 as part of the Lafayette Railroad relocation project, was sitting waiting to be scrapped. So, on Thursday, January 24, 2002, the bridge was cut in half, driven out to Wolf Park and since the bison field with all the recent warm weather and rain is a tad bit too muddy to drive a car in, much less heavy trucks carrying a bridge, so here it sits spanning our parking lot :-)  
 

The bridge and loup trail are in place! Some more work needs to be done on the trail, but it is quite passible and tours are given daily. Even Orca has gone over the bridge!