Humane Senora Nature Exhibit grand opening was a success

The Humane Senora Nature Exhibit drew record crowds at a grand opening officials are calling "flawless." The trees are still mostly upright. Nobody is asking where they came from anymore.

For seventy-two hours back in May, the stretch of Grand Senora Desert off Route 68 was the most talked-about construction site in the county — a wall of fencing, a sky full of Cargobobs, and a fleet of strapped-down trailers stamped MADE IN CHINA that residents insisted were full of "trees that definitely didn't grow here."

Three weeks ago, the fencing came down. Behind it was the thing they'd been building.

The Humane Senora Nature Exhibit until recently known to the public only as "Grand Senora Premier Experience — Opening TBD," and known to one woman on the adjacent service road as "that thing keeping me up since Friday" — held its grand opening to a crowd that the county tourism office estimates at "several thousand" and that everyone who was actually there estimates at "a lot, more than I expected, the parking was a nightmare."

By every official measure, it went off without a hitch. There was a ribbon. There was a brass band, bussed in from somewhere, playing with the specific enthusiasm of people being paid by the hour. There was Blaine County Supervisor Dale Fitch, who arrived forty minutes early, stayed four hours, and cut the ribbon twice. "I told you," Fitch said, to no one who had disagreed with him out loud. "I stood right here a month ago and I told you people are going to come from a very long way to see this. And look around. They came. They're spending money. Real money. Good money. The kind of money that used to drive straight through Blaine County without so much as tapping the brakes."

He was, in fairness, not wrong about the crowds.

The exhibit itself is by the accounts of the roughly two hundred visitors Weazel News spoke with genuinely impressive. A looping trail winds through what the brochure calls "seven distinct living biomes," past viewing platforms, misting stations, and a gift shop that one visitor described as "honestly bigger than the actual nature part, but I bought a hat, so." Admission runs $44 for adults, $29 for children, and "inquire within" for groups, a pricing structure the tourism office defends as "premium, but immersive."

And the trees, the much-discussed, internationally-sourced, allegedly-non-native trees, are in the ground. Planted. Upright. Green, even, which several botanically-inclined residents had openly doubted would happen this far into June. Visitors report that the staff are friendly, well-organized, and almost uniformly evasive about anything beyond their immediate station. Asked where the animals were sourced, three separate employees gave Weazel News the same word-for-word answer — "through fully accredited international partners" — delivered, in one case, while the employee was actively reading it off a laminated card clipped to their lanyard.

Most of the workforce, as predicted, came from out of state and has already largely departed. The hundreds of laborers who built the place in seventy-two hours are gone. The roughly eighty staff who remain to run it arrive each morning in unmarked vans and, residents note, do not appear to live anywhere in Blaine County. There is also the matter of the fencing.

State Senator Patricia (D-Rockford Hills) — who chairs the oversight subcommittee that was, famously, not informed of the rezoning, and who learned of the project from her seventy-four-year-old neighbor Gerald — confirmed this week that her formal records request has gone unanswered for nineteen days.