Shortly after entering Oregon, I spotted a confusing sign along the road that read “Tigers Reservation Facility”. It seemed like a mistake being out in the middle-of-nowhere southern Oregon.
Just as I said to Ryan, “That can’t mean what it says it is,” we passed by a fenced in facility that, we would soon learn, is home to over 40 exotic cats of all sizes.
Still a little skeptic and confused, Babe flipped a U-turn and we pulled in only to find a Bengal Tiger within 40-50 yards away (caged, obviously). We both immediately turned into seven year old versions of ourselves, each grabbed a camera and skipped in like we had discovered a lost kingdom.
The Great Cats World Park at Cave Junction, Oregon.
We didn’t have time for the full tour so we opted on the $10 a pop option which allowed us to roam freely in the front park where they keep 7 of the 44 cats. The crazy cat lady in me was seriously freaking out. Separated by just double rows of chain link, we hung out with leopards, a mountain lion, a couple of tigers, some form of lynx and my personal favorite, an 11 week old water cat.
As if our adrenaline wasn’t already pumping, on the tail end of snapping the sixteen month old white tiger Brutus, we experienced our first “oh-s***” moment of the trip.
After quite a bit of camera flirting through the fence line, Brutus sauntered to the back of his pen and began slowly crouching behind a log, literally staring into Ryan’s soul the entire time. Snapping ferociously with the zoom lens I said, “Look, its hunkering down like Boogs does behind shoes.” Simultaneously, we both remembered what comes after the hunkering down behind shoes and before either of us could get out the next sentence, Brutus came bursting out of the log at full charge straight for us. As Babe says, “My mind was saying it’s OK, there’s a fence there, but my body was saying I’m about to get eaten by a tiger.”
I was able to capture the hunker but nerves and instinctual reaction got the best of me and I dropped the camera during his sprint forward.
Heading over to Tessa the seventeen year old mountain lion, Brutus gave one more lunge at Ryan through the fence. Thank goodness we were in the setting we were because all I could think for a brief moment was “How am I going to explain this one to his mother? See, so there were these tigers in Oregon…”