Voice of the Mid-Columbia | Kennewick, Pasco and Richland, Wash. |
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closeSaturday, Jul. 04, 2009
Hanford Reach museum offers (baby) mammoth preview
By Michelle Dupler, Herald staff writer
Families can get an up-close view of the Hanford Reach Interpretive Center's first exhibit before the center is even built.
A replica of a baby woolly mammoth skeleton discovered in Siberia in the late 1990s will be on display at the Columbia Center mall in Kennewick starting at 11 a.m. today, along with a box where people can enter a contest to name the mammoth.
The exhibit is at the south end of the mall near the Old Navy store through Dec. 31. The mammoth is about three feet long and 34 inches tall, and will be on display in a glass case.
The naming contest ends Oct. 15. The winner will be announced Oct. 31.
The original mammoth skeleton is at the North American Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point near Lehi, Utah.
Kimberly Camp, executive director for The Reach, said at a news conference Friday that she stumbled across the baby in December while searching for the Huntington mammoth skeleton, which is housed at the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum.
Camp was on a quest to acquire a replica of the mammoth -- which is a type of hairless mammoth that roamed the Mid-Columbia during the Pleistocene epoch -- but couldn't get to the museum because of snow.
A clerk at a dress shop suggested Camp visit the museum at Thanksgiving Point instead.
Camp said she toured the museum and knew immediately when she saw the baby that she'd have to bring it to The Reach -- just in time to coincide with the opening of the animated film Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, which features a woolly mammoth couple about to have a baby.
Camp said the baby mammoth is just a sneak peek of what's coming once the interpretive center opens its doors.
"We plan to have a full-size replica of an adult male Columbia mammoth skeleton in the Great Hall, along with our Ice Age Floods Theater, and exhibitions about the rich history of the Mid-Columbia," she said.
The $40.5 million center will be a 61,000-square-foot facility at Columbia Point South in Richland, and is intended to tell the story of the Mid-Columbia's history, geology, people, plants and animals, including Hanford's role in winning the Cold War.
The center will offer tours of B Reactor -- the nation's first full-scale nuclear reactor -- once it opens.
The Reach has been in planning stages since 2003, but Camp said the project is moving along and she hopes to break ground on the building within the next year.
One of the delays has been a lengthy process to get necessary permits from the state and federal government. Camp said The Reach is in the final stages of a mandatory cultural survey intended to evaluate the site's cultural significance.
Columbia Point once was a gathering spot for tribes in the region, and they consider it a sacred place.
"We know the site is important because of the history of the region," Camp said. "Everything is being done to protect the site, protect its cultural significance. ... It is beautiful, but it also has spiritual significance. It is a great place to fish, but it also has historical significance."
Columbia Point recently became eligible to be listed on the National Register of Historical Places because of its rich past, but Camp didn't know how that might affect plans for the building.
She pointed out that the eligible area includes land that already has been developed with condominiums and marinas.
The next step for The Reach is to study how the building will affect the land, and to continue fundraising efforts, Camp said.
So far, more than $25 million has been raised toward the project, which is estimated to cost $40.5 million to build.
Camp said she hopes putting the baby mammoth on display will show people that progress is being made even though construction is yet to start.
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