OGDEN — The Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Northern Utah is looking to celebrate the opening of its temporary facility along with accomplishing a major stride toward its permanent home.

On Saturday, the WRCNU will hold a reopening celebration to commemorate the opening of its temporary facility on Washington Boulevard. The celebration will be held at the Ogden Masonic Temple at 1240 20th Street at 1 p.m. There will be crafts, games, music, a food truck and even a few birds on hand.

WRCNU Executive Director DaLyn Marthaler told the Standard-Examiner that Saturday’s party is about more than just a building opening.

“This grand opening is really just a celebration of our people,” she said. “Everybody came together and helped us. They’ve been supporting us and together as a team — between people donating, people coming to give their time, people giving supplies — we as a community did it.”

The WRCNU’s temporary facility will be opening its doors to help animals once again on Monday.

“We have worked really hard with our staff of volunteers and community members that came out,” Marthaler said. “We are now at a point where we can open. The facility is not complete yet, but it’s done enough that we can start taking animals in and start getting back out there and being able to help our community.”

She said only a few odds-and-ends remain in fixing up the building, which is a mix of an old commercial building and an old house.

“It’s going to be slow enough this time of year that we can easily manage the animals and still make that happen,” she said.

Last year, the WRCNU was given notice of eviction by the city from the facility it had called home on Park Boulevard in order to facilitate an expansion of Dinosaur Park. More than 100 volunteers have been helping prepare the temporary facility on Washington Boulevard for use since last summer.

“When we first looked at it, we knew that it was going to take some work,” Marthaler said. “But once we got in and started working on it, we kept finding continuing problems.”

She said the temporary facility has taken on the nickname “Pandora” because she and volunteers continued to find new problems throughout renovation work, including white mold, poor plaster work, walls and flooring that needed total replacement and excessively steep stairs. Marthaler said more than 4,000 pounds of material were removed from the structure.

“We think we have finally tamed Pandora,” she said.

Marthaler said there will still be some limits on what types of animals they can help for the time being.

“Before, we were able to take in almost any animal up to the size of a beaver,” she said. “Those larger animals and some of the aquatic animals, we won’t be able to get. Things that need pools like ducks and geese. We can do some shore birds, but beaver, otter, ducks, geese are ones we can not do.”

As the the WRCNU’s temporary facility opens next week, the future of the operation is beginning to take shape.

“We actually have purchased property on Highway 89 in Harrisville,” Marthaler said. “We do have that secured. It is paid for. It is bought. Right now, we’re just kind of regrouping. We’ve got an architect that’s working with us right now on some conceptual plans for that.”

She said fundraising for a new, permanent facility will begin once the group has an idea of costs and other considerations for construction. She says the goal is to move to the permanent location within the next five years.

For more information on the WRCNU, visit https://wrcnu.org/.