WILD FLORIDA LAUNCHES ‘GATOR WEEK’
Snowflake and Blizzard have learned the cue: when Wild Florida co-founder Sam Haught makes a popping noise with his mouth, the two hulking white albino alligators crawl slowly into a small pool.
That lets visitors get closer to 400-pound, 9½-foot-long female Snowflake and 300-pound, 7½-foot Blizzard, a male, with a steel guardrail to protect the humans — just in case.
Wild Florida, south of St. Cloud in Kenansville on Cypress Lake in Osceola County, has brought in more than 100 alligators to its 15 acres during the past eight years, with Blizzard and Snowflake serving as main attractions. “We give people the opportunity to overdose on gators, if that’s what they want,” Haught said.
Starting today, the attraction will host “Gator Week,’’ a series of shows and events meant to draw interest in the nature-based theme park. It’s the second year for the event — but this time it’s official.
Haught received a government trademark for the phrase “Gator Week” in late March. His goal is to grow his business as he takes advantage of the popularity of the similarly named “Shark Week” on Discovery Channel.
“Last year, we had 10,000 people
here in one week,” he said. “We thought, ‘We really got something here.’ Before someone tried to steal it, we said, ‘Let’s trademark it.’ ”
During “Gator Week,” handlers will demonstrate the reptile’s bite strength, jumping ability and teach visitors to do gator calls. Then, on Friday, customers can eat the reptiles during a gator cook-off.
Wild Florida, which offers airboat rides alongside the park that features dozens of animals including Watusis, gators and sloths, expects to have 200,000 visitors this year.
It’s a far cry from its first year in 2010, when Haught did his best to play it cool around his first few customers.
“I started asking, ‘Where did you get the brochure? Why did you come here? Where are you from?’ ” he said. “I didn’t want to act like we were desperate for customers, but we were desperate. He was probably annoyed.”
The path ahead will not be easy for Wild Florida, Rollins College associate professor Jana Mathews said.
For one, large theme parks have the budgets to adopt the latest in technology, meeting most visitors where they spend a lot of their time: on their phones or online.
“They are constantly playing catch up in technology, which has become a bigger part of this industry,” Mathews said.
A spokeswoman for Gatorland, a larger reptile attraction, had no comment.
Central Florida’s secondary theme parks have a love-hate relationship with the region’s main draws, Mathews said.
“Those places would probably go out of business without attractions like Disney bringing people here,” she said. “But the visitors also like going to these theme parks to mix it up every now and then. The secondary theme attractions capitalize on visitors once they are here. These are add-on attractions.”
That’s how Haught attracted Vanessa Johnson with her two children on a recent morning.
Initially in town to visit Disney World, Vanessa said an ad for Wild Florida popped up on Facebook while she planned a trip from Utah.
Haught, who uses social media ad campaigns to directly find Central Florida visitors, flashed a sly grin when Johnson said that.
“That was all me,” he said. “I did that.”
What Johnson found was a park that grew from four friends trying to figure out what to do with 15 acres of land they acquired about eight years ago.
When they decided to include gators, the real challenge of stocking the park began.
The quartet of friends — an accountant, a construction company general manager, a recently graduated college student and former Goldman Sachs employee Haught — had to figure out how to get a stubborn gator off the truck.
“We had to lure them into the water,” Haught said. “The only way to do that was to stand in front of him and say, ‘Come get me!’ ”
It worked. Years later, the park is now preparing for its first official “Gator Week.”
“People will only protect and conserve the things they love,” Haught said. “So we get them to engage with the gators here.” For more information on “Gator Week” and admission information, visit gatorweek.com