A "Forest Playground" features rope-climbing structures at different elevations—ladders, nets, and webs, with safety nets underneath. Aerial walkways, rope suspension bridges, and tree houses reveal forest stratification, canopy habitats, and bird's eye views of the park. Tigers inhabited the forests of Korea up until the early twentieth century, and they remain a powerful cultural symbol, as protective guardian, folk-tale hero, and image of the "Mountain Spirit". A "Tiger Valley", that people can circulate through in caged walkways, contains real tigers, as well as a Sanshin-Dang (shrine building) housing the message of the Mountain Spirit: that this beloved animal is now extinct in Korea due to deforestation and habitat loss.

The educational program at Ulsan Park is centered around such issues as the survival of species, biodiversity, and the sustainable use of water, forests, energy, and agricultural land. To Korean people, the concept of longevity has great significance, therefore gardens devoted to such longevity symbols as turtle, crane, deer, pine, and bamboo are designed to be not only poetic and deeply enmeshed in the cultural psyche, but also create ecosystems where these plants and animals can survive.

Perhaps the most powerful symbol in the park is the dragon, an enormous image that appears in fragments throughout the site, uniting wetlands, valleys and mountaintops with the more urban areas of the park. It is now clear that the dragon is more than a myth, most likely an ancient pterosaur such as Quetzalcoatlus, a flying reptile about the size of a small plane, with claws, scales, and bat-like wings. Like the dragon, the pterosaur occupied both watery places, where it fished and hunted crustaceans, and the upper atmosphere where it was an expert at long-endurance soaring. Koreans have always understood the dragon as a mediator between heaven and earth—the Celestial Dragon and the Water Dragon—responsible for rain and agriculture as well as bountiful sea harvests. Contemporary ecological thinking also envisions the flow of energy between water, air, and earth, thus the dragon becomes a metaphor for the elements and processes of nature, its cycles of production, decomposition, and transformation.

When water was worshipped in Korea as the sacred sustainer of life, water pollution was not a problem. Perhaps by reintegrating nature and culture within public landscapes, we can ensure the transmission of both ancestral truths and the preservation of the gene pool that ceaselessly provides new forms, meanings and products.