What to bring?
Stroller?
Yes
Restrooms?
At walk through entrance and gift shop
If you are going to the Grand Canyon, especially with kids, Bearizona in Williams, Arizona is something you do not want to skip! After days of traveling through national parks hoping to see animals, this site allows you to see them all and more! Allow for half of a day or 3-4 hours to get the full experience. I promise you that your kids will not want to leave! The price was $30 each for adults but free for our little guys. We began our day early, soon after opening at 8 am but noticed the animals were more active around lunchtime, when it’s feeding time. The park also gets more crowded around lunchtime.
Note: If you have any luggage racks or coolers attached to your car, they will have to be removed at the entrance but a place is provided for them to be stored. We did this with no problem!
There are two portions to this park, the drive through exhibits and walk through exhibits. When you enter the park, you begin with the drive through portion. We got the kids out of their car seats and let them sit up front with us. We found wolves, deer, elk, bison, and of course, bears!! In each exhibit there were little roundabouts where you could stay in the exhibit longer without holding up traffic. Most of the animals were sleeping, but we had a bear right next to our car chowing down on oranges and a herd of bison cross right in front of us.
At the end of the drive through exhibits, you reach the parking lot for Fort Bearizona, the walk through portion, which is much like a traditional zoo. There are porcupines, prairie dogs, baby bear cubs, otters, jaguars, and more! The animals were all super close with awesome exhibits. We of course had a few favorites! The baby black bear, Roscoe, was super playful! He was jumping on logs and even climbed both up and down a super tall tree, drawing quite the crowd. The jaguars were hanging out right against the glass & the spotted one kept snapping at our daughter like she was lunch! Lastly, there was a cool cave our daughter loved crawling through, where we found some Grizzly Cubs snoozing!
Animals aren’t the only attraction there though! Though overpriced, there were plenty of places to grab food that smelled amazing! A lunch grill with confession food and ice cream, a few food trucks, coffee and drink bar, and a full restaurant overlooking the exhibits. The gift shop, which we usually try to avoid, was actually really cool too! It was a lodge style that connected to the restaurant. They had a bird trainer who had some exotic bird out flying and letting customers feed and hold it. It inspired our daughter to pick out a stuffed bird that squawked as her souvenir!
Overall, this park was super nice, clean, and had a very well done design! It definitely put the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone to shame and rivaled our zoo back home, which is one of the best in the country! After not knowing what to expect and thinking it was way overpriced, we were very happy with our stop and would highly recommend spending a portion of your time at Grand Canyon there!
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