What did you think of this exhibit? Arctic Passage is the biggest complex that the zoo has ever opened, and it has been a huge success in terms of popularity, but is it any good? I visited the zoo in 2014 and so just missed the exhibit. Considering that Arctic Passage opened in 2015, those cement walls and lack of grass (admittedly at this time of year) paint a slightly bleak picture.
I'll write some more detailed thoughts on my report for the news thread later on, but overall I quite like Arctic Passage. The bear exhibits are quite good without being anything too special, and as much as I don't like the hideous concrete walls, the yards looks very good aesthetically. It's worth noting that it had been both raining and lightly snowing the entire day of my visit only subsiding shortly before I entered the zoo, so the exhibits look unusually messy compared to how they are in the warmer months. I'm also a sucker for the restaurant with the windows looking out into the polar bear exhibit. It's clear all of the attention went towards the bears, as the seals are definitely an afterthought in the grand scheme of things. Regardless, for a zoo the size of Henry Vilas the fact that they were able to pull this off is very impressive.
In many ways this complex feels like a cheap knockoff of Assiniboine Park Zoo's Journey to Churchill (not sure which one came first) as there are a surprising amount of parallels between the two exhibits. Both smaller zoos that built arctic complexes with large concrete walls, a restaurant with polar bear viewing, similar thematics, etc. I realize how unfair it is to compare the two when this one was like a tenth of the cost to build, but it was just an interesting thing to note.
