Splash park at Memphis Zoo to open Saturday amid Mid-South heatwave

This story has been updated to clarify that online ticket sales are not yet available, but will be once the website works.

The Monogram Foods Loves Kids Foundation Splash Park is slated to open to the public Saturday at the Memphis Zoo, the organization announced Wednesday morning.

The splash park has been under construction since September 2021 and originally planned to open before spring break in 2022, but supply chain problems pushed the opening back. Zoo members were able to access the area throughout the last week, getting a test run of the new venue before casual zoogoers will.

The park sports a number of water play areas, with no pools so anyone is safe to play, and comes at a time when the Mid-South is plagued by heat advisories.

"We've already seen a little bit of an uptick [in patronage] during this time," Memphis Zoo President Matt Thompson told The Commercial Appeal. "It's no secret that any outdoor venue in Memphis during July and August are just tough, brutally hot. We've tried for years to provide more indoor spaces and cooler spaces. You can see about the number of people that are in our fountains and  they want more water-related things. Sure enough, the minute we open this, people are showing up in droves, despite the heat, just to come come visit this spot. It's been it's been fantastic for the zoo."

As with the zoo's iconic entrance arches, and Egyptian architecture, the pad will also have an Egyptian theme "as a tribute to the very beginning of our city. Memphis, TN is named after the ancient city of Memphis, Egypt," the release said.

The splash pad will have two sessions each day and each session is limited to 300 people. The first will be between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m., with the afternoon session starting at 2 p.m. and ending at 5:30 p.m.. Tickets are $8 for zoo members and $10 for normal customers and available at the gate, but will also be available online. The website for online purchases is not working yet, but Thompson recommends patrons buy them online, when it launches, due to demand.

"We started off a low number of 200 per session just to see how everything would go because we wanted to make sure we could handle capacity and get all the kinks worked out of the system, if there were any," Thompson said. "And we realized very quickly we could we could up it up into 300. People have really been enjoying it all week and it has sold out the majority of the sessions so far."

The park also has "luxury cabanas" for rent, fitting 6 people at an $80 price point, offering additional shade to the area, along with new public and family bathrooms, a lactation room, lockers and a food cart.

The space is located where the hippo exhibit once was, and the old barn that housed the animals has become an event space. Thompson said the water for the splash pad is entirely reclaimed, similar to how the geyser at the Teton Trek exhibit is, allowing the area to run in a much more sustainable manner.

"The water goes down into a big underground tank, and then goes through a state of the art filtration system where it's filtered, then sanitized and then and then put put back out," he said. "So it's I think it's the perfect reuse reuse of that space."

Although the new splash pad is the zoo's first water recreation area, Thompson is open to further development akin to the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans.

"This was step number one, and we'll see how it goes," he said. "The Audubon Zoo started off with a splash pad and then a few years later later added a lazy river around, which is which is very, very popular there. I don't know that we have the room for it like they have it. But our options are open for something in the future. We wanted to at first provide a safe place for people to bring their young kids and have them enjoy this space worry-free for now."

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Lucas Finton is a news reporter with The Commercial Appeal. He can be reached at Lucas.Finton@commercialappeal.com and followed on Twitter @LucasFinton.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Memphis Zoo splash park to open Saturday after delays