Zoolights: Point Defiance display keeps visitors coming back

It was going to take one heck of a holiday light display to impress me, I thought, as I drove into Tacoma's Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium, home to what I'd been told was one of the Puget Sound region's most spectacular displays, Zoolights.

I wanted to see for myself what all the fuss was about. But as the sun went down and zoo staffers flicked on lights across the 25-acre grounds overlooking Commencement Bay, whatever doubts I had quickly vanished.

Zoo spokeswoman Carolyn Cox, who was giving me a tour of the light show, pointed me toward the most stunning single display, "The Flame Tree," a gnarled old apple tree wrapped in 300 strands of LED lights with 100 bulbs each. Yes, 30,000 lights on one small tree — green bulbs for the trunk and purple for the leaves.

We strolled closer to the tree and Cox suggested that if I looked up into the purple lights and squinted, I'd get the sensation of floating through some Technicolor universe. So I did, and she was right. More than just beautiful, the tree was a twinkling, dazzling jewel, unreal in its brightness.

It took three people two days to wrap that one tree in lights, I learned.

More lights popped on as the sky grew darker. Through some trees, I spotted the lighted outline of a bear. But this was no stationary display. The zoo's maintenance technician, Kim Varian, along with a crew of zoo employees, built rows of black wooden light panels around the park with lights timed to flick on and off, creating animated scenes. The bear, for example, appeared to sneak up on a beehive, reach in and grab some honey, then sprint off into the forest.

I remember saying something to Cox like, "Wow, that's so cool." I guess I'm more of a child at heart than I thought.

Another animated display featured an eagle swooping down into a blue-lighted stream filled with leaping salmon, snagging one of the fish with its claws and alighting in a nearby tree to feast on it. More ooh-and-ah moments were to come.

Penguins slipped and slid down an ice drift. Puffins skated on a building's roof. Raccoons rummaged through trash cans. A beaver chopped down a tree. A peacock flashed its bright plumes. A komodo dragon lurked in the bushes. Camels grazed in a stand of bamboo.

One of the first displays visitors will see is a giant model of Mount Rainier, which looms over cheeky replicas of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (with streams of white and red lights representing the bridge's notorious heavy traffic) and the new Narrows Bridge currently under construction (with toy construction trucks on its bridge deck).

More than 520,000 lights in all are used to create Zoolights. It's certainly not your average holiday display, and the crowds prove it.

Each year, the zoo and aquarium receive some 600,000 daytime visitors, but Zoolights by itself draws about 80,000 people in just more than a month.

While the daytime crowds tend to be children under 8 years old, Zoolights attracts visitors of all ages, including dating couples and teens, Scott Clarke, the zoo's assistant operations manager, said.

Even with competition from displays such as the Bellevue Botanical Garden's elaborate Garden d'Lights show, with its hundreds of plants made out of bunches of colored lights, people keep coming back.

"It's a real testament to the quality of the show that we have that much attendance," Cox said.

Varian and Clarke have been working on Zoolights almost since the display started 19 years ago with about 50,000 lights, and they are nonchalant about all the work that goes into creating this spectacle.

Varian said today, it takes nearly two months to set up the display and just as much time to take it down. One of the biggest challenges is creating animal shapes that are easily recognizable when lit with a limited number of bulb hues, mainly green, purple, orange, red, blue and white, she said.

The LED lights increasingly used in the display consume substantially less energy while delivering more vibrant, truer colors, Varian said. The result, to my eyes, is amazing.

The Zoolights crew is always adding features to keep the display fresh — the zoo's walrus has two new female companions, so now the Zoolights walrus has two female pals — but the childlike thrill of walking the zoo's pathways as the wilderness comes to life in lights would keep me coming back even without the updates.

As Cox put it to me, "It really does un-Grinch you."

Tyrone Beason: 206-464-2251 or tbeason@seattletimes.com