Wildlanterns returns to Woodland Park Zoo Friday

Welcome back. The Woodland Park Zoo's hit holiday experience, Wild Lanterns, returns tomorrow, but it may look a little different than this video from past years. Here to talk about the experience is animal keeper Bree Winchell. Good morning, Bree. How are you? Good morning. We're doing so well. We're so thrilled to have you here to talk about Wild Lanterns and introduce you to Molly, our porcupine. Oh, there's Molly the porcupine. How old is Molly the porcupine? Molly is about 14 years old now, so she's kind of considered middle-aged, hitting some of those golden years, but she is, as you can see, quite enamored with her snacks this morning. That looks like a very healthy snack. All right, well, we want to talk about the wild lanterns. What do you tell people that have never seen it before? So Wild Lanterns is an incredible opportunity to visit the zoo in a very different way in our winter season. You get to see all of these beautiful lanterns. We've collaborated with Tianyu, which is an incredible organization that helps to install original lanterns like this, both in North American installations and across Europe. And they custom make some of these lanterns for the zoo. So they're very unique sometimes to our zoo and our experience, which is pretty incredible. And every year you have new ones, right? Can you tell us about that? Yeah, we have new lanterns every year. This year, we're going to be exploring all seven continents from frozen Antarctica to, you know, the African savanna. You'll be able to see lanterns featuring wildlife and ecosystems from all of those different places. So it's really an incredible opportunity to see lanterns of both, you know. Snow leopards, as well as some really fun sea creatures this year. We have a great crab that is just incredible on our pathway. Yeah, it's always incredible, whatever the zoo does. There's special nights planned, though, right, for wild lanterns? Yeah, we have a lot of really incredible theme nights planned this year. These theme nights will be very different. We'll have things like Seattle Sports Night, always a favorite for the community here. Also, we'll have low sensory nights, a holiday senior stroll night, pop star night, as well as our night owls events. We'll have multiple of those for our 21 and up crowd. Yeah, so much to offer. I've been to it before. It is fantastic. It's beautiful. It's fun for all ages. So where can people get tickets for Wild Lanterns? So tickets are on sale now because Wild Lanterns actually opens tomorrow on November 13th and it'll be going from 4 to 9 p.m. each night. You can get tickets at zoo.org slash wildlanterns and those tickets for admission In addition, ages two and under will be free. And there is a 20% discount for members. And we actually have a new opportunity this year called the Season Pass. So if you purchase that Season Pass, you have unlimited admission to Wild Lanterns throughout the season. And it pays for itself in under three uses. So a great opportunity to come back and see your favorite lanterns over again or give those kids a chance to see it maybe, you know, with a little snow, on a dry night. Or if you hit a little rain, it's always a great opportunity to come back and see us. Yeah, you never know what you're going to get. We get on Friday the 13th as well with wild lanterns. All right, Bree and Molly with the Woodland Park Zoo, thanks for joining us this morning. Thank you so much for having us. We look forward to seeing you at the lanterns. All right, see you soon.