Wild Rivers (water park)
water park in Irvine, California
Wild Rivers is a water park in Irvine, California, United States. It originally opened in July 1986 on the site of the former Lion Country Safari.. Following a closure in 2011, it reopened in 2022 at its modern site, 50% larger.
History
1970-1984: Lion Country Safari
Before Wild Rivers was built, the land was a drive-through zoo called Lion Country Safari, which went bankrupt and closed in 1984.
1985-2011: Wild Rivers water park on Lion Country Safari site
The owner of Lion Country Safari still held 13 years on the original 29-year lease for the land, which he then subleased to the operators of the Wild Rivers water park, the Camp Frasier (later Camp James) summer camp and the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre.
Construction on Wild Rivers "Mountain Top" which would serve as the launch point for their largest rides, began in 1985 and the park itself opened in 1986. Congo River Rapids, Rattlesnake, and Python were the first large scale long form rides to open.
In early 2011, Wild Rivers announced that it had lost its lease with The Irvine Company. Both the park and the adjacent Camp James closed on September 25, 2011. The park was planned to be demolished with 1,750 apartments being built in its place.
“Wild Rivers (water park)” enters the record as water park in Irvine, California. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wild, Rivers and water can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Wild Rivers (water park)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Wild, Rivers and water provides the most credible route into that argument.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8000777. Authority coordinates are 33.667, -117.731. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1986, 2011, 2022 and 1970.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wild Rivers (water park)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.