Before we see the elephants in the Elephant Valley at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, we face directly the destruction, the only beautiful waste. A long winding path takes visitors around and under felled trees. Old gray trees form arches, for example, over high bridges over clay-colored paths the colors of hooves.
This project is meant to redirect us, to a path not traveled by humans but traversed and carved by elephants, a creature still misunderstood, maligned and hunted for its catastrophic ability to reshape the world, and sometimes societies.
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“It starts,” says Kristi Burtis, vice president of wildlife care at the Safari Park, “by telling the story that elephants are engineers of ecosystems and their environment.”
Elephant Valley will open on March 5 as the newest addition to the Escondido park, whose goal is to bring visitors closer than ever to the zoo’s eight elephants, ranging in age from 7 to 36 years old, while focusing on conservation. The centerpiece of the 13-acre-plus park is a curved bridge overlooking the savanna, which allows elephants to walk beneath visitors. But there are also cave-like nooks that, although not previewed at a recent press event, will allow visitors to view the elephants at their own level.
When you depart from, say, the famous Safari Park tram ride, there are no fences or enclosures in sight. Captive elephants are always a controversial topic at times, and the zoo herd is a mixture of rescues and births, but the aim was to create an environment where people are removed once and not hinder the animals’ ability to roam freely by keeping visitors too high. As an example of how close people can get to the herd, there was chaos at the event when one of the elephants started throwing what was believed to be a mixture of dirt and feces over the bridge.
Aerial view of Elephant Valley at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, home to eight elephants.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
“Our guests will be able to see elephant hair,” said Kristi Burtis, vice president of wildlife care at the Safari Park.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
“Our guests will be able to see the hair of the elephant,” said Burtis. “They can see their eyes. They can see their eyelashes. They can see how strong their trunks are. It’s going to be really different.
Elephant Valley, complete with a multi-storey lodge with open-air restaurants and bars, has a natural design that is not influenced by the home of the African elephant as it interacts with it. The goal is not to displace it, but to bring in public art – Kenyan wood and beads can be found on paths, rest areas and so on – as a show of admiration rather than imitation.
“We can’t pretend we’re taking people to Africa,” said Fri Forjindam, now chief creative officer with Universal’s theme parks but formerly lead designer at Elephant Valley in his role as chief development officer at Mycotoo, a Pasadena company.
“That’s a slippery slope that can go wrong quickly,” he adds. “How do we see where we are right now, which is close to San Diego? How do we fill this plane with native plants in the area? The issue of coexistence is important. We don’t export to Africa, we learn. We don’t export to elephants, we share knowledge.”
But designing an elephant-first but also human-built environment presented many challenges, especially when the collaborative teams aimed to create multiple narratives around the animals. As meetings about Elephant Valley began in 2019, staff worked to touch on themes related to migration and conservation. And there was also a desire to make elephants.
“Where can we highlight each elephant with names, so it’s not just this big herd of random gray creatures?” Forjindam says. “You can see here in the house.”
Two of the eight elephants feed during the Elephant Valley preview.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
That lodge, the Summit House — a phrase that means “gathering” in Swahili — should offer visitors the chance to stay longer, although zoo officials say reservations are recommended for those wishing to dine in the space (there will also be a walk-up window). Menus are yet to be released, but the building’s ground floor, a hut-like roof designed to blend in with its surroundings, features intimate views of the elephant pool and an indoor space with a central tree under star-like lighting that mimics sunrises and sunsets.
Throughout there are wood carvings of animals and beads, often hung from figures made from tree branches. The ceiling, lined with colorful fabric tapes designed for ventilation, aims to create a minimal conflict between indoor and outdoor spaces.
There are, of course, research and educational purposes for space as well. The Safari Park works, for example, with the Northern Rangelands Trust and the Loisaba Conservancy in Kenya, with an emphasis on studying elephant-human conflicts and finding non-lethal solutions. Non-profit and conservation organizations estimate that today there are about 415,000 elephants in Africa, and the African wild elephant is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Elephant Valley watersheds have been redesigned with paths and steps to make it easier for elephants to walk. The hope is to promote the game.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Research on elephants in the zoo is shared with the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in hopes of bringing care to young elephants to prevent orphanages. Additionally, Safari Park has conducted extensive research on the herpes endotheliotropic virus. “The information we collect from elephants here, you can’t just get from elephants in the wild,” said Burtis.
One of the two entrances to the Elephant Valley is lined with beehives; Bees are known to be elephant protectors and can help prevent animals from harming plants or communities. To encourage more natural behavior, the plane is equipped with timed feeders in an effort to encourage movement across the acreage and establish a real-life level of unpredictability in resource hunting. Water areas have been redesigned with paths and steps to make it easier for elephants to navigate.
The view from the Elephant Valley Summit, a two-story restaurant in the new San Diego Zoo Safari Park.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
With the Elephant Valley, Forjindam says the aim was to allow visitors to “look safely in comfort – whatever it is – but not instead of power, as a cohabitor of the Earth, with as many natural features as possible. It is not to impose dominance. In the end, it needed to feel natural. It could not feel like a safari, a unique experience where the animals are a man-made product, a kind of man-made product. In this case, the prize, the home of the elephant.
And the resulting feeling of Elephant Valley is that we, the paying customers, are simply their house guests.
