By Jill Sperling

High Wildlights attendance caps record year for BC Wildlife Park

Jan 7, 2019 | 1:01 PM

KAMLOOPS — The twinkling lights that illuminated the BC Wildlife Park over the holiday season drew more visitors to the park than they’ve had in years. 

Between Dec. 14 and Jan. 6 more than 18,000 people attended the 21st annual Wildlights Festival. 

“We had an amazingly great Wildlights this year,” said Glenn Grant, general manager of the park. “Our final total was 18,239 visitors, which is substantially better than what we’ve had over the past seven or eight years. Last year we had 12,000 so it’s a big jump from last year to this year, that’s for sure.” 

Grant says the increase in visitors had a lot to do with the mild weather. 

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“Sure, we had a great show and we had a lot of new things this year, with the Canadian Tire Gazebo, the Grinch rope light scene in the amphitheatre, so there were a lot of new things, but also the weather also really did help get the numbers up for Wildlights.” 

The high attendance at Wildlights caps a record year for overall attendance at the park. 

“Our fiscal year ends on Jan 31,” Grant said. “The previous best that we’ve ever done at the park was in 2015 when we introduced Clover to the public and we had 103,198 visitors. As of yesterday we’re sitting at 104,302, so it’s a new record.”

Grant says more tourists coming from China, Australia, Germany, California and Washington played a large part in upping the numbers. 

He plans to put the revenue generated from the record year to good use by improving the Wildlife Park. 

“We’re going to do some improvements to the park, to some of the habitats. One thing we’re going to do in the spring time is, we were very very fortunate to have a donation come into the park recently of $10,000, that we are then going to build a little mini golf area near the wolves.” 

Some of the money generated from the year will go into a reserve fund. 

“Although this was a great year, I don’t anticipate them all being great and all being records. So, we do have to make sure we put a little reserve fund away for the years that aren’t going to be as good to us as this year was.”