This day in history: Walk in the Wild zoo gets high praise from Kansas expert

From 1975: A “prominent zoo consultant” inspected the Walk in the Wild zoo site and declared it “one of the best sites I’ve ever seen.”

“It will be a tremendous site for the natural display of animals,” said Jack Jones of Zooplan Associates in Wichita, Kansas. “I think it can be the most natural zoo I’m familiar with. The area has a nice variety of land forms which can be used to show off each animal in its natural biological setting or biome.”

It was in a rocky and forested setting in what is now the Mirabeau Point area along the Spokane River.

Yet Jones also noted that Spokane “is at least five years and many dollars away from a finished zoo.”

That “finished zoo” would never come.

In 1975, Walk in the Wild was still in its infancy. The future would turn out to be equally rocky. Voters would reject several bond issues to fund upgrades and expansion and the zoo would close in 1995.

From 1925: A “general shakeup” made headlines in one of the most important economic initiatives in the Inland Northwest, the Columbia Basin Irrigation League.

Its goal was to create a vast irrigation project to convert sage land to farmland in central and Eastern Washington. Yet progress had been slow.

The league announced it had hired Frank Goodwin, former assistant secretary of the interior, to become the league’s representative in Washington, D.C., and asked its current executive secretary to resign.

Goodwin was well-positioned to accomplish the league’s most important task: to carry the project “straight to Congress.”