Bolliger & Mabillard do not design intense roller coasters anymore. Sure, some of their rides might have moments of forcefulness, but none from the past decade would make a seasoned coaster enthusiast question putting their hands up for the entire ride. This is not a necessarily value judgment on B&M coasters, just an observation of fact. Rather than intensity, it seems that for most of their career B&M have wanted to specialize in “flight sensations”.

The very first unique vehicle design they made as an independent company wasn’t the standard sit-down as one might have expected, but the radically innovative inverted coaster. Although increasing the rider’s exposure below the seats proved a huge success for roller coaster design, you couldn’t see the sky and the back rows would feel shut in, so they needed a new formula for simulating flight. 1999 saw the debut of the floorless coaster, which solved some of the visibility problems of the inverted configuration, but returning the track below the riders eliminated the sensation of being dangled above a landscape in open air, and the resulting perception was negligibly different from a sit-down design with raised seats. The introduction of the flying coaster in 2002 represented a more obvious attempt at capturing the feeling of free flight, and although the Superman positioning the rider and the unobstructed view got the “flight” part right, the hefty restraints and awkward gravitational pull on the body meant that the “free” part had taken a step backward. I think their greatest success in achieving a flight sensation was ironically found in a design originally intended to simulate falling like a brick, when they gave their Dive Machines ten abreast floorless seating in 2007. Sitting on an outside row of the massive vehicle allowed for a clear view both above and below the rider as on the flying coaster, but the upright seating felt more natural and unobtrusive, the rider free to look where they pleased rather than be forced to gaze straight down with gravity.

Twenty years after the inverted coaster was first introduced, B&M have returned to Six Flags Great America with a new roller coaster design that might finally achieve what they’ve always been striving for. By placing riders to the side of the track, the wing coaster combines the best aspects of the inverted and floorless designs, and places riders in a much more open, minimalistic seat configuration than allowed by their flying coasters. Relative to its rather small scale, the new for 2012 X-Flight achieves a flying sensation better than any other coaster I’ve been on. It was also the first time in a long time I felt like I experienced something completely new and different on a B&M coaster. X-Flight is simultaneously graceful and unpredictable, and is the best roller coaster built at Six Flags Great America since either Raging Bull or Batman: The Ride, depending on if I count the former with or without trim brakes. I’m not exactly sure what the “X” is meant to signify, but whatever it is, it makes flight better than even Superman’s ultimate.

Now that I’ve taken care of the initial praise (if you’re looking for a simple “yay” or “nay” recommendation, the answer is “yay”), it’s time to get on with my favorite part of any ride analysis: the criticism. Although the wing coaster does “flight sensation” better than other configurations, it’s also the most limited in force and dynamic contrasts. There are various reasons for this, possibly owing to stress on the cantilevered wings (although the physiology of the rider is still probably the main limiting factor on forces, rather than the frailty of the steel arms), and a need to reduce vibrations that become amplified as they move further away from the track (I noticed some ‘flapping’ in the back rows, nothing too major but it could potentially lead to a headache depending on your constitution). However, the main reason the pacing and intensity must be slowed down on wing coasters is because the rider’s path lacks a single centerline. When the track begins to bank around a curve, riders on one side of the train will rise while those on the other will fall. Without a heartline that the track can be built around, there’s virtually no possibility for any tight rotational transitions on a wing coaster without encountering some really bizarre and possibly dangerous forces. All of the 4D coasters from S&S/Arrow or Intamin try to avoid inline transitioning as much as possible in favor of other ways to turn the track around, and while Furius Baco has a few fast corners, at 80mph the length of the transitions is still quite large compared to the wingspan of the trains (and I wouldn’t call that coaster a resounding success at rider comfort anyway).

With that said, it should be very interesting to note that X-Flight’s layout seems to make more use of inline transitions than most other coaster configurations B&M have designed to date. There’s the twist at the top of the lift, the first zero-G roll, the twist out of the Immelmann, the second zero-G roll/corkscrew, and then of course the signature inline barrel roll through the control tower, as well as a few other banking transitions sprinkled around the layout. None of these rotations are taken very fast, but they’re still tight enough relative to the wingspan that you encounter some really funky dynamics. I’ve always wanted B&M’s designs to feel a little less controlled, and although I usually think about this in terms of force and pacing, losing control over the heartline also works at returning  some character to the experience.

Back to the criticism: although the ride looked stunning on opening weekend with its blood red and graphite grey color scheme and bevy of modernistic props and architecture, I’m worried this look won’t age well and in a few years after it has lost its new coaster shine it will become another faded, thematically-incorrect steel monument on an empty square lot surrounded by the shells of disused special effects, and the high visibility of the structure on the midway will become a curse rather than a blessing. Six Flags doesn’t necessarily have the best track record in regards to this sort of upkeep (2008’s Dark Knight coaster has recently become divorced of its preshow, queue themeing, and music/sound effects, and the resulting attraction is now more depressing than it is lame), but for now I’ll retain my optimism that Six Flags will prove me wrong about X-Flight and enjoy the eye candy while it lasts.

Also, as cool as X-Flight looks now, it looked a lot cooler when I rode it in California where it was called X2. Although for a coaster enthusiast the comparison between these two attractions might not be immediately obvious, from the perspective of the marketing department they’re virtually indistinguishable. Same color scheme, same clamshell steel station, same ambiguous “xtreme” theme, and even the logo has the exact same steel boilerplate design. The only difference is that X2 is much more theatrical and grandiose, and X-Flight has narrowed the theme down to something to do with stealth fighter jets, although I’m missing the ability to play with fun postmodern interpretations of the theme that X2’s vague pop culture references allowed.

The station in particular needs some work. Aesthetically it leaves something to be desired, but I’ll ignore that for now and focus on logistics. If riders can’t exit on the opposite side of the train it needs either a separate unloading platform or something like the cattle pen boarding setup found on Eejanaika. Efficiency becomes an issue when they have to wait for everyone to gather their belongings and exit the far end of the platform before they can open the airgates for the next set of riders. Dispatch times on the whole could use a bit more work, but I guess that’s to be expected during the opening week of a new attraction. The winged design also presents a social problem: who gets the outside row? Since the winged seating is the primary gimmick separating X-Flight from other coasters at the park, the outside row has significantly more value for most riders than the inside row, and if lines are long and your riding partner and you are expecting this to be your first and only ride of the day, there’s going to be a discussion that ends with someone making a sacrifice. With me, it usually tends to be the other guy. (Sorry, Dan.)

The seats are comfortable and the restraints are well designed. I wasn’t sure what I’d think of them because I can’t say I’m a big fan of the flexible vest/shoulder strap arrangement found on some of the newer Vekoma and Intamin coasters. While they eliminate the risk of any hard material playing ping-pong with your skull, they also tend to be a much snugger fit over the shoulders and keep anyone of even a moderate body build pressed firmly against the seat back; riders over six foot tall have reported even more discomfort with these than with the standard hard restraints. Thankfully, B&M resolved this issue by attaching the top of the vest to a retractable belt, which allows you to lean forward off the seat back without too much resistance (this is important should the ride ever pick up a rattle, plus it makes hanging over the diving first drop more fun), and it makes the restraints much more accommodating to riders of different body types.

Now that we’ve made it into our seats, what about the ride experience that awaits? The chain lift incline is steeper than usual which means we reach the top in very short time, and coupled with the wide breadth of the catwalk makes the coaster appear shorter than 120’. But perhaps this illusion is for the best, if only because it makes cresting the lift and being greeted with the slow rollover into the initial dive loop feel much more shocking by comparison. I mentioned earlier that in many ways this coaster feels like a departure from the formulaic B&M design, and although I meant that mostly in regards to the unusual dynamics of a non-heartlined roller coaster, it also applies to the individual elements. This dive loop in particular is a refreshingly different way to gain kinetic energy, as I’ve become numb to the effects of the various curving and straight drops that have been implemented in various forms on roller coasters ever since the days of L.A. Thompson, with even beyond vertical drops becoming staid after more than a few times. I’m sure the dive loop first drop will eventually become tired as well if it’s repeated too often, but at this moment in history it’s something I’ve not encountered before, and I’m appreciative of that. Front row, left side is the best seat for experiencing this maneuver, mixing awkward hangtime and laterals with an uneasy feeling of vertigo as you rotate around the track and can look straight up, and then forward, at the ground below.

Most early reviews seem to cite the first and last inversions as X-Flight’s highlights, but I’d argue that the second inversion, a zero-G camelback roll, deserves special recognition as well. Sitting on the wing in the left side of the train, the seat is pulled out from under you and you do this strange weightless tango around the track that you can’t really predict beforehand. On standard coasters the heartline rolls might appear as crazy sections of track the way it curls around an invisible center path, but then the actual experience can feel very controlled. But on a wing coaster the opposite is the case, and the combination of looking mundane but then riding a bit off-kilter is far more effective psychologically. The track’s pathway is no longer necessarily your pathway, and the inability to visualize exactly how your body will be contorted next even as you trace the rail outline with your eyes is what allows X-Flight to be simultaneously unpredictable and graceful.

The next several maneuvers repeat this formula but without the same degree of remarkability of the first elements. The Immelmann inversion is basically an inverse of the first dive loop but absent the unique approach which means it gets lost amid the layout; the red-headed, unloved middle inversion, as it were. A water splashdown effect on the following ground-hugging turn is a neat change of pace, and although it doesn’t look as natural or convincing as on Manta or Shambhala and serves mostly to get the right side of the train a little wet, it’s certainly better than nothing and I appreciate that they’re attempting to make every moment unique. The next inversion is similar to the first zero-G barrel roll I praised, but this one is more corkscrew-shaped than inline, and therefore the unpredictable dynamics are somewhat neutered. The low point of the ride is when we dip through a lame cut-out “jet hangar” on the exit of this inversion. This either needs to be made three-dimensional or should be scrapped altogether, because without any tunnel effect it’s completely forgettable on-ride, and off-ride it just looks cheap and makeshift, especially as it stands in a very visible location from both the queue and the main midway, and is immediately comparable to the much more attractive control tower nearby. The following inclined helix, although banked at nearly 90°, is the tamest part of the ride, and also the first time the winged seating isn’t put to good use.

Just as it’s beginning to seem as if X-Flight would follow the same progression of diminishing action and anticlimax that plagues so many B&M designs, they throw a curveball and conclude with possibly the best part of the layout. The inline barrel roll makes maximum use of the Wing Coaster’s potential, combining the unusual dynamics of the non-heartlined configuration with the unique visuals of the open, exposed seating. I had heard reports that the visual near-misses on the other B&M wing coasters tend to go by unnoted, and while that was true of the 2D hangar, it’s not of the keyhole through the control tower. Granted, it didn’t exactly feel like a perilous near-miss (that we’ll rotate through the structure with plenty of clearance is never in any doubt, not even for a fleeting moment of instinctual response when it first comes into view) but it’s a cool visual effect nonetheless. It’s immediately followed by another special effect, a mist screen through the support columns as we’re turned completely upside down, and this technically can be considered a real collision, albeit a completely harmless one. (The mist was never on too strong that it became distracting, and I had no problems with it clouding up my glasses; yes, unsecured glasses are permitted on X-Flight, at least on the day of my visit.) The rotation speed of the twist is slow and stately, taking its time to hang us upside down before we’re once again righted. It’s an extended moment that lasts several beats longer than is normally expected from an inversion, which makes for a satisfying ‘grand finale’ to the entire experience. And that’s not counting the last helix, which is a nice denouement to release any remaining adrenaline before coming to a complete halt on the brakes; plus, tall folks on the far right side of the train might feel compelled to lift their feet up because they come very close to the ground.

Comparing X-Flight to the similarly sequenced Swarm at Thorpe Park, I noticed where that ride seems to go wrong is that the barrel roll finale is too brief. You enter the brakes at the end thinking “is that all there is,” which is a very bad last impression to have if you want your ride to be considered a truly great attraction. (Of course, this is judging only from the POV videos and reading reviews that seem to corroborate this interpretation.) Even though they both have about the same rates of rotation, the Swarm starts the rollover already at 90° from the previous turn, and ends as soon as it levels out into the brakes, meaning there’s only about 270° of rotation. X-Flight’s barrel roll, on the other hand, has two banked curves bordering either end that turn in the opposite direction of the roll, so the motion is unbroken for at least 450° of rotation. This stretches it out for several beats and makes it feel like a completed action, whereas the Swarm still feels unresolved by the time you reach the brakes.

I know it’s not exactly considered good etiquette among coaster enthusiasts to compare rides you haven’t been on yet; apparently we’re all strict empiricists and can make absolutely no a priori claims about the world until we’ve encountered it first hand; this seems like bad news for the designers, whose best hope is to randomly plug together elements and hope the final result is okay. However, this feeling of completeness and resolution at the end of X-Flight seems to be missing from the other Wing Coasters, at least to the same degree, and I feel I can claim with a certain degree of confidence that X-Flight has the best layout of the four built so far. Of course, I reserve all claims about which of the four built so far is the best overall until I’ve actually ridden them, as there are too many other variables not present on X-Flight, most notably the stronger themeing on Swarm and Raptor, the additional height and speed on Swarm and Wild Eagle, or the natural forested setting of Wild Eagle.

Regardless, X-Flight is certainly as good a roller coaster as I ever could have hoped for given the limited land and creative talent available at Six Flags Great America, not that my expectations were that high to begin with. I’m still waiting for the day when a new coaster will be announced that will do for the wing coaster what Tatsu did for the flying coaster, but judging on the relative successes of the design so far (especially compared to the still somewhat lackluster Air and Supermen models), if/when that day comes, the results should hopefully be one of Bolliger and Mabillard’s top career achievements.

It was not so very long ago that the Iron Wolf was my favorite roller coaster at Six Flags Great America. I think the year was 2005. Back then I found a dynamic, twisting layout that was deceptively longer than it looked, and despite being a compact B&M coaster on a small plot of land in the back corner of the park, it was old enough that the trees had grown so tight around the track that at times it felt like we could have been a mile removed in a remote forest. Another reason it was my favorite was because it reliably had the shortest queue for any major roller coaster in the park. This unpopularity was probably mostly attributable to its oft denounced status among park-goers as “rough”. I hear this said about a lot of coasters, and I rarely understand it. When people are flaming a coaster in online message boards about how it cracked their spine in two and caused cranial hemorrhaging, and then I ride the coaster in question and don’t have any problems whatsoever, I have been led to believe one of three conclusions:

1): That I am very lucky that I always get to ride rough coasters on their one ‘good’ day out of the year.

2): That most enthusiast’s skeletal structures are made of Crispix.

3): That I am a masochist without realizing it.

While generally I like to believe hypothesis #2, my continued loyalty to the Iron Wolf even after getting pulverized by the restraints on several occasions might indicate I should more carefully consider hypothesis #3 in the future. Opening in 1990 as B&M’s first roller coaster as an independent company, the Iron Wolf represents the Swiss firm at their absolute rawest. At times we’re jolted around not simply due to of loose wheel assemblies or a primitive heartline technique that’s only calculated up to the second derivative, but because the track itself is misshapen (you can see a big kink halfway down the curving first drop). Knowing all of that, I’m not pained or discomforted by this coaster at all. Maybe I’ve somehow adapted a better self-defense technique against these rides than most people. I can subject myself to all the jostling whilst carefully avoiding any fatal blows which allows me to climb off it in perfect, healthy condition but weary of all the hard work I had to put in to stay that way… this seems to be a better adrenaline rush and scare factor than all the uber-controlled coasters that try to feign intimidation. Even up to its last day, I never once actively regretted taking a dance with this wolf.

Today was the end of an era, the final operating day of the first B&M coaster ever built at its original location. Starting tomorrow, crews would begin dismantling the structure to prepare it for relocation to Six Flags America near Washington D.C., where it would be reborn as the Apocalypse. I was expecting to see queues over an hour in length as local fans and enthusiasts rushed to take one final stand on the Iron Wolf after providing over two decades of thrills for Chicagoans. We never waited longer than ten minutes. As the evening approached zero-hour, the fans were even more thinly spread. It was a thankless farewell. A small group of coaster enthusiasts waited by the entrance for them to close off access, either unaware that the queue was so short that we were running laps around them, or else they were posers who had no real enthusiasm for the Iron Wolf and simply wanted the last ride for posterity. Was I the last friend the Iron Wolf would ever have?

“Howl if you’re excited to be here for Iron Wolf’s last day ever!”

“Howooooo…!”

“Howl if the Iron Wolf is your favorite ride at Six Flags!”

(dead silence)

This was also my friend Dan’s first time riding the Iron Wolf. He’s not a coaster enthusiast, yet. I tried to tell him as little about the coaster as I could, for fear of swaying his opinion to my favor too much and not getting an honest reaction from him. After our first ride together (which I got a little beat up on, taking the hits on the outside seat of the front row so he could have the smoother middle seat), I asked him what he thought.

“That was a pretty good one. I approve.”

Even after its condemnation, the coaster was still able to win at least one new admirer for its own merits. Later we rode in a back outside row and Dan’s appraisal was a little more hesitant, but we agreed we would like to finish the night getting as many rides as we could anyway. We joined the queue for the front row about ten minutes to park closing. Everyone wanted the front row. This made the attendants angry as they needed bodies to fill the remaining six rows and they were only sending a limited number of trains out before the end of the night. She counted off, pointing to Dan, me, and the two single riders behind us:

“You four are going to be on the last train. Everyone else needs to fill the rest of the empty seats or you are not going to ride!”

All the posers grumbled as their plan to wait until the moment before the entrance closed to snag the last ride blew up in their face. Meanwhile, our final group of four celebrated our victory as we inched nearer to the air gates, offering to snap each other’s photos for this momentous last ride. The Iron Wolf was old and rusty and kind of rough, but we were all ecstatic to be here. After twenty-two years of service, it was our time to ride.

I’m going to miss the Iron Wolf. I’m going to miss the chug-chug of the train rumbling onto the lift, with the underside of the car chassis clipping against a metal handrail. I’m going to miss the lift hill peering out over the trees in a remote corner of the park, and the awkward intensity of the first drop. I’ll miss flipping upside-down in the first loop, catching a faint hint of hang time, and wondering if I’ll be able to survive the next turns. I’ll miss the aerial maneuvers over the old timey county fair station house with its little flag fluttering below, and the midcourse block brake pause that never was. Most of all I’ll miss the twisted second half of the ride, which will never be the same at Six Flags America. There are so many trees that at times the rusty red track seems to be enclosed in a tunnel of pine and bark. It was not until this last day that I was finally able to figure out in my head exactly the layout this convoluted figure eight takes through the forest (turns out it’s almost identical to the finale of Mantis!), and being able to see it all out in the open on an empty field in Maryland will deflate a lot of the reason I still call myself a fan of the Iron Wolf.

The move was nevertheless still a wise one. It was painfully clear that the Iron Wolf had long since stopped serving its purpose for Six Flags Great America, and it will help out a park in desperate need of a new attraction after over a decade of loosing thrill rides. And we have X-Flight to fill the void. I’m skeptical it will ever be able to match the Wolf’s rustic intensity, but it’s doubtless it will be a far better fit for Great America’s needs over the next two decades than the Iron Wolf would have been. And looking further ahead, I can’t help but notice that the plot of land formerly occupied by the coaster will be sitting empty, in a corner of the park that could really use a big new attraction to circulate the crowds. As good as X-Flight looks, might even better things come as a result of this loss of an important coaster milestone? We shall see…

Next: Geauga Lake

Previous: Little Amerricka

Are we sure the park is nearby? Although we have faith in the GPS device, it’s a little incredulous to believe that in the middle of this remote rural countryside we can be less than two minutes away from an amusement park that’s home to four separate roller coasters. Just as we began to think that it had surely made an error in calculating the correct distance, a small town crops up among the, well, the crops. I think Clark Kent once lived here. Marshall, Wisconsin consists of a few blocks of suburbs and a commercial area that has a traffic light, gas station and convenience store, and, on the other side of the block, Little Amerricka. The town is not much larger than the amusement park, and that’s not saying much for either of them. There’s free parking and free admission, and you can buy individual ride tickets at $1.50 or get an all-day wristband for around $18.¹ It appeared as though most of the people visiting on this Labor Day weekend were out-of-town tourists like ourselves. The whole village was probably here with their families today, but that still couldn’t account for more than a third of the patrons.

Little Amerricka is a park I like. It’s sort of like the midwestern version of California’s Adventure City, in that it’s a small park owned and operated by a hobbyist (Lee Merrick, hence the odd park name) that originally opened in the 1990’s as a showcase for a miniature railway set, and then became a haven for vintage fairground and amusement park rides that found their original homes displaced. It gives the impression that the park has a much longer history than it actually does. What’s great about when modeling hobbyists decide to build an amusement park is that there’s never a lack of attention to details. Despite not having huge sums of capital to work with, you can count on all of the rides to be extremely well maintained with a crisp, fresh coat of paint and using all of the original operating equipment. Even the midway, essentially an old parking lot, has been made so festive with banners, streamers, patriotic flags, and filled in with shrubs and potted plants, that you’d barely know the difference. The park will someday install the Hopkins Log Flume that was picked up from auction at Chicago’s Kiddieland, and later will build a recreation of the Lincoln Park Comet hopefully using the original NAD Century Flyer rolling stock. There are no exact timetables for these projects, as the park is a DIY paradise.

With only an hour and a half before closing time we opted for individual tickets and needed to plan strategically. Our first attraction would be the park’s vintage 1960 Herschell Mad Mouse, located immediately to the right after walking through the depot building which serves as the front entrance. The cars seat one person each, two if you’re with a small child that can fit on your lap, although the line still moves relatively fast thanks to the presence of four cars that rarely stack more than two in the loading platform due to the absence of any restraining device whatsoever in the car save for a seatbelt. Hand over the ticket, hop into the steel tub, give the thumbs up, and away you go. The experience can be a bit nerve-wracking because the spindly steel structure looks like it could shake itself apart, and the rails consist of an inverted L-beam barely an inch wide to guide the wheels along. But it’s been working without incident for over fifty years (at least one assumes), so there’s no real need to worry.

The small layout is slightly non-standard, due to the lack of enough vertical space to fit many large drops after the standard aerial switchback beginning, it instead fits a couple of helices into the middle superstructure as well as a couple more particularly violent hairpin curves. To cap off the layout, there’s a couple of small dips and hops before the brakes that can provide a brief boost of weightlessness made all the more thrilling for the absence of anything holding you in. The whole thing lasts about a minute, not bad considering it’s basically a giant plug-and-play erector set roller coaster.

Next up was the Wild & Wooly Toboggan, a Chance Toboggan coaster also originally manufactured in the sixties. I’m sure the technology of an enclosed vertical lift hill was fairly impressive for the time, especially as it was mounted to a transportable rig for use in traveling carnivals, but today it is often regarded as one of the worst coaster types ever devised. The first and last time I had been on one was in 2008 at Lakemont Park, and the experience as I described it back then could best be equated to a metaphysical crisis. Ironically, after 500 roller coasters, the scariest rides are no longer ultra-intimidating stratacoasters but things like this.

Get locked inside a claustrophobic cage, tilt all the way on your back, climb up an even more claustrophobic vertical tube with no clear safety features in the event of a power failure, and once you reach the top is when the real terror begins. The layout is basically a downhill spiral that wraps around the lift tube, not really gaining speed due to the continual presence of reduction brakes but not really easing the dizziness either. But the psychological terror is that the whole time I’m thinking about how much longer I have until the violent drop at the end, made nearly impossible to predict due to the restricted visibility out of the car and the fact that my eyes are spinning in circles by the time I get near the bottom anyway. Could be coming any second, but wait, there’s yet another spiral and-

WHOMP.

The vehicle lurches face forward and then immediately yanks me back upright, requiring some defensive cranial maneuvering for taller riders against the low roof. Well, I survived and none the worse for wear so I guess I can’t say it was a regrettable experience (checkmark #567), but even if I was free from time constraints I doubt I’d try a second time as I’d surely be taunting the gods.

While the presence of a Chance Toboggan is a very bad piece of news for any coaster enthusiast who must ride every coaster once for posterity, the good news for enthusiasts is that the Little Dipper has no maximum height or age restrictions to ride, unusual for this model of Allan Herschell kiddy coaster. Since I had never been able to ride one before, now seemed like the ideal opportunity. It’s tame and to be honest, consisting only of flat circular curves and a couple minor dips less than five feet deep, deathly boring. The operator was more than happy to welcome me aboard, but that didn’t particularly help ease the embarrassment of riding alone. I don’t know why maximum height restrictions are normally required because anyone over 42 inches tall would have to have a really good reason for wanting to ride it. But it’s also quaint and has cool retro cars. Plus the location is interesting, wrapping around a miniature kiddieland and the view from the top of the lifthill overlooks the neighborhood cemetery.

I bought an extra ticket than would be needed to ride each of the coasters once, and decided to use it on the park’s Eyerly Roll-O-Plane they’ve named the Test Pilot. The guy that operated this thing was possibly having more fun than the riders, deliberately faking out endings before sending us around again in reverse, at one point even getting up to pretend to let us out but then deciding, “Nah, you’re not done yet.” The ride lasted at least five minutes, possibly more, which if you’ve ever been on a Roll-O-Plane before you know that would be too much of an otherwise good thing. My mistake, I think, was riding in a capsule opposite two young girls who expressed some reservations about the scariness of the ride to the operator before getting in.

We just barely made it into the queue for the Meteor on time. They shut it off two people after us, which meant we didn’t have the luxury to choose our seats (we ended up smushed together in the second row of the third car) but at least it was six dollars worth of tickets not wasted. The Meteor is a PTC Junior coaster, relocated from Hillcrest Park which ran the coaster from 1966 to 2003, and which had already been relocated from a different park after it originally opened around 1953. However, its location as the centerpiece of the park gave the impression that the coaster had always been a part of Little Amerricka since opening day. The park apparently bought it partly for practice before attempting to reconstruct a much larger astronomical object, the Comet from Massachusetts’ Lincoln Park.

There’s not much to the ride save for some gentle drops and a few quick turnarounds, and nothing much in the way of any force, making it possibly the third tamest roller coaster in the park after the Toboggan and Mad Mouse. Nevertheless it’s a great ride to bring people together, and our experience in particular was enriched by another practical joker of a ride operator. After our first ride, and presumed final ride of the evening, we returned to the station only to find that he had time to let us go around for one final victory lap of the night. Woohoo, we cheer, as we’re sent around again. Back in the station, he again lets off the brake lever so we don’t even come to a stop, not even saying a word. Third time’s the charm, right? But okay, after this time, we’re done. Nope. Straight past the brakes and up the lift hill a fourth time, just as a light sprinkle from an ominous storm cloud overhead starts to become noticeable. Alright, we’re surely done now, correct? Five times? Well, at least we’re getting more than our money’s worth, even if we’re starting to get a bit wet. Okay, it’s going to be raining pretty hard any minute now and the entire park has already been emptied out for closing, so we must be on our way…

After the sixth involuntary lap we were finally told “I’m done,” (the only two words spoken to us during the entire marathon session) and we had to make a run back to the car as the sky was on the verge of a torrential downpour. Little Amerricka must have some of the coolest (albeit also the most eccentric) employees of any park I’ve been to, to the point that I briefly considered if I wanted to give them my vote for Best Staff in the next Golden Ticket Awards. Although barely larger than a suburban neighborhood block, the park offers a surprisingly large amount to do that I’ll certainly be back to ride the rest of the rides again (whether currently existing or yet to be built) again, especially because we had to skip their signature three mile long Whiskey River Railway. With luck, in another decade or so, I think the small town of Marshall in Wisconsin could have a new Knoebels for the 21^st century.

Next: Iron Wolf (Six Flags Great America)

Previous: Bay Beach Amusement Park

I’ve shied away from mentioning politics in my reviews except for the occasional broad pop-culture reference, in part this because I don’t want to potentially alienate any readers, but also because I try to avoid politics within my own life as much as possible. Whether on the left or right, many people have a perverse tendency to make their political identity the deepest core aspect of their personal identity. To claim to be a “liberal” or “conservative” is to orient one’s individual placement in the world within the context of a particular mass narrative. It’s a means to limit personal responsibility against our own ethical self-determination; our concerns and conclusions both tidily handed to us from mass society, fueled particularly by the media outrage machine.

I guess in a highly atomized society people need to feel part of whatever collective they can find association with, and part of what it means to be in a collective is to have an easily defined “other” to fulfill certain roles in the mass narrative. We see this in-grouping on all sorts of hierarchies, whether at the level of the nation-state, the political party, and even within sports teams. (By the way, if you’re a self-professed liberal/conservative and you’re thinking as you read this, “hell yeah, the other side is always like that”, then do me a favor and slap yourself in the face really hard right now.)

 As soon as I identify myself as being oriented within a certain group, I risk becoming the “other” and having the interpretation of my words twisted even more than ordinarily due to my strange syntax and undertones of stoner college student pretentiousness. Which is why I try to talk philosophy rather than politics whenever I’m not being a complete roller coaster dork.

Be that as it may, with all the current debate on the American budget deficit and governmental spending (and with apologies to my many international readers), I’ve felt compelled to share my own opinion on the matter.

In a gross simplification of the current cable news discourse, it seems you’re either for big government or big business, and both are radically different and diametrically opposed institutions. I, however, fail to notice any significant difference in their respective functions. Both are autonomous, self-created organizations of human beings that maintain certain power relationships with the rest of society as a means of organizing resources and labor. Government is much more monopolistic in nature than business, but it hopefully makes up for that by being more democratic and responsive to non-profit motivated needs. Otherwise to me they seem to both be variations on the same basic idea, and until we achieve some sort of neo-Marxian, post-capitalist-and-nation-state political economy where resource allocation and information dissemination is completely decentralized through the next generation of world wide web, I don’t see the need to pretend like one is morally superior than the other.

And frankly, I don’t care which side you pick as long as it gets the job done effectively.

The current popular discourse that claims that only one method can be systemically better than the other in my opinion is a far bigger problem than GM laying off another round of employees or the federal government wasting a couple grand of taxpayer dollars on some imbecilic party. There are mounds of economic research that support free markets as the best ways of managing capital, just as there is for scholarship that supports a view that shared expense public resources can be more economically efficient than profit driven competition. Both are probably true within certain circumstances, and neither is particularly interesting enough to warrant shouting at other humans in town halls or online just because they happened to have picked the other team. And even if it was, the complexity of this economic relationship cannot possibly be reduced to fit on a political bumper sticker.

Because, really, our problem is not that we suffer from a budget deficit. Want to know how to make a budget deficit go away? Well, if you print the money, the answer is simple. It’s called an eraser.

No, our problem is that we have a value deficit.

Which brings me figuratively and literally to Green Bay, Wisconsin.¹ Roller coasters and amusement parks are generally within the domain of private enterprise, but not in Green Bay. With a history dating back to the 1890’s, over the years Bay Beach has hosted various entertainments from swimming, dancing, roller skating, and even a couple of roller coasters. Today it is a free-admission park under the public ownership of the City of Green Bay. Rides are few in number, covering only most of the basics such as a Ferris Wheel, Scrambler, Tilt-a-Whirl, Bumper Cars, Chair Swings, Minature Train, and a spinning torture device known only as a SCAT.² Tickets are a mere 25 cents each, with attractions requiring anywhere from one to four tickets to ride. As we pulled up to the park on Labor Day weekend Sunday, we found the place was jam-packed and could not find a parking spot anywhere. When we finally did get in we discovered an approximately twenty minute wait for the starring new attraction, despite running two thirty-passenger trains with reasonable dispatch efficiency. Although slightly frustrating for us long-distance travelers on a tight schedule, it was amazing to witness how such a small, simple park could have so much value for so many people.

The main reason we, along with so many others, were here this weekend was for the new roller coaster the city had commissioned for that year. The Zippin Pippin is a relocation (or to be more precise, a re-creation) of the John Miller designed coaster formerly located at Libertyland Amusement Park in Memphis, Tennessee. Supposedly it was Elvis Presley’s favorite roller coaster, a small bit of notoriety that made the Zippin Pippin a more marketable relocation project to be chosen over a couple of other worthy relocation candidates in Ohio that would have been in better condition and with unique salvageable rolling stock. Arguably paying $35,000 at auction for what ultimately amounted to the rights to the blueprints (would need to be radically redesigned anyway), name (a generic title for coasters of that era that I’m skeptical would receive copyright protection from the defunct Libertyland) and a few worthless pieces of equipment (a couple signs and the lead car of a poorly conditioned PTC train that dates no earlier than the late 1960’s), was something of a bone-headed move, but I don’t think public or private ownership was in any way a unique cause.

To be honest, the new Zippin Pippin looks very little like the old one. Not a single mechanical part from the original ride made its way to Green Bay save for a few pieces of ornamentation near the entrance. The Gravity Group, working with Martin & Vleminckx (say that name five times fast) took the basic configuration of the Memphis coaster and completely updated it to 2011 standards. Except for the brakes, lift, and coaster cars (salvaged from the much more recently constructed Thunder Eagle coaster, also formerly from Tennessee) all the materials are brand new. Even the basic look and feel of the old wooden coaster has changed considerably. The trains have been extended to a chain five cars with individual ratcheting restrains, which I assume gives it a different pace over the hills than the shorter configuration of the original ride. The wooden structure has a modified construction using bolts and square steel plates instead of simply nails, the shimmering silver in the structure almost immediately giving the ride away as a totally modern coaster with only the vaguest real connection to the past. I know nails in wood are a bit more archaic (although it’s still no problem for Great Coasters, Intl.) but given that this was supposed to be branded as a relocation of a historic ride would it have been too much to ask for some construction techniques that were still popular less than five years ago? I was almost made to wonder if it wouldn’t have been cheaper and easier to have simply designed a brand new coaster from scratch. Surely the Elvis appeal can’t sell that many tickets in this day and age, especially in northern Wisconsin?

Yet such criticisms would overlook the fact that the new Zippin Pippin is, in fact, an excellent ride that maybe even manages to better some of the other modern designs produced by the Gravity Group. I’ve noted in the past that contemporary roller coaster design tends to put too much emphasis on serpentine configurations that you often can’t sort it all out in your mind as you’re riding it and the experience only morphs into an onslaught of random sensations that all stay comfortably within the same force and dynamics limitations set by the computer. It seems that a return to the classics has allowed the Gravity Group to get a bit more character out of a ride that otherwise would have a lot less to offer than their much larger and more ambitious debut project located a couple hours south.

It alternates between slow panoramic views of Green Bay with a couple of big, fast drops in the beginning. One odd feature I noticed was that the turns weren’t built in a perfect circle, but instead had this strange shuffling effect built into the track. From the front row you can see quite clearly with the naked eye that the rails follow an octagonal pathway more than a circular one. I’m not sure if this was deliberate on behalf of the Gravity Group, or if it was found in the original Zippin Pippin layout (there’s some evidence there was in this video, but not nearly to the degree I recall from the new design), but it’s at least one way this coaster distinguishes itself from the crowd.

It then transitions to a more tightly paced series of airtime hills that run away from the park alongside the bay. These hills have a nice rhythm to them, achieved through an uneven variation of triangular profiles that provides an interesting sequence of anticipation-pop-resolution-valley-repeat; for me much more colorful than identical parabolic crests and valleys plugged directly into each other. The second-to-last hill is especially worth mentioning. This seemingly innocuous hill has an extremely angular crest that will (excuse my French) kick the shit out of you. Negative G-forces to the extreme, although sustained only for a split second, ride in the Herb Schmeck seat (third row, first car) only if you dare. The short duration and presence of individual ratcheting lapbars means Cyclops is still the go-to ride in the state of Wisconsin if you like ejector airtime, but this tiny hill certainly gives The Drop a run for its money, especially because it happens with almost no warning or time to prepare. Like the octagonal curves, I can’t figure out if this was an intentional or even historical design feature, but regardless I like it.

Due to the long lines and the fact that we needed to get down to Marshall before Little Amerricka would close I only had enough time for three rides on the Zippin Pippin; first in the front row, then in the back, and finally in row 1-3. The third ride was the best, although folks with milder dispositions might prefer a seat somewhere in the middle of the train away from a wheel seat. Not an ideal lap count given the travel distance involved, but I was hardly in any mood to complain because it delighted me to no end to see that an honestly pleasant small park could be so popular just for adding a no-frills wooden coaster, especially compared to the relatively big-budget commercial tackiness found in the Dells the day prior which could barely manage to find enough customers to fill all the seats on much larger coasters operating at one-third the capacity.

That’s how you fix a value deficit. If your situation happens to be that you’re on a city planning council and you can figure out a way to create something of value for the city, don’t sit around twiddling your thumbs waiting for the invisible hand of the marketplace to come to the rescue instead, based on some faith that small government must always necessarily be for the best. Take initiative and make it happen using whatever resources you have available and under whatever political-economic system there happens to be. That’s what the City of Green Bay did, and now they have a great wooden roller coaster where once there was none, and it’s an investment that’s depositing considerable returns back into the pockets of local taxpayers. If a private business could have managed the same, then that’s also great and I hope few people stand in the way of that drive unless there was a legitimate reason to do so.

But it’s not even about the coaster’s profitability. As I said, it’s about the value that this endeavor has created for the people of Wisconsin and beyond. “Value” can sometimes seem like an abstract entity when decoupled from monetary currency that makes it easy to track and quantify, even though in reality “value” is far more concrete than “money”. So I’ll give you an example of what I mean by “value”. The physical nuts and bolts that construct the meaningful world we inhabit, that’s value. Thirty seats on a roller coaster that will each encounter nearly ten moments of weightlessness or negative G-forces on a single lap, that’s value. Children screaming and laughing with their parents when it’s all over, that’s value. Standing in line on the stairway to the loading station next to an extended family group, the middle-aged son turning to thank his aging father for bringing all his siblings together for one last occasion before the summer was over, that’s real value.

The Zippin Pippin is valuable for this country, and I thank the men and women that made its relocation/re-creation in Green Bay possible. I hope more cities, businesses, and individuals around the world will have the courage to follow their lead.

Next: Little Amerricka

Previous: Timber Falls Adventure Park

We had originally planned to do Timber Falls Adventure Park on the second evening in the Dells after the Wisconsin Ducks tour had finished, but by the time we got there a light drizzle had turned into a steady downpour with no sign of letting up and all we could do was drive by and think how good it felt to be dry. Even if I had been willing to get very wet and cold, the prospects for any decent photos seemed nil. The previous time we were here we had allocated nearly an entire day just to Timber Falls which allowed for more coaster rides and mini golf games than should have been necessary. So we decided the best plan of action should be to do nothing, especially since prices have gone up and I have heard that time has not been so kind to the wooden track. I’m noticing a trend for wooden coasters located in the Dells.

Nevertheless, one of the main reasons I planned on a return trip to the Dells in the first place was because I really wanted to get a Timber Falls review out of it. I mean, surely no one thinks I’d go to Wisconsin just for my own personal gratification, right? So what the hellcat, even though I don’t have new photos I’ll write one anyway based on my last trip from 2005, when I had more than enough time to get an impression of the place to last a lifetime. Just excuse the low-quality pictures, please. 2005 was long, long ago in technology years…

Timber Falls has an interesting business model that I’m disappointed hasn’t been replicated at more locations across the country. Not an amusement park, but more substantive than a typical FEC, Timber Falls’ strategy has been to find a niche base market, and then strategically expand with reasonably major theme park rides that gives it a competitive advantage while keeping operations small and economical. With just a coaster, log flume, and four minigolf courses included in the price of a one-day admission ticket, Timber Falls found a way to become a half-day destination without requiring the huge overhead of similar regional amusement parks which require large staffing and related facilities to handle the plethora of smaller supporting attractions that eat into operational expenses. It seems like a logical upwards progression from the Pirate’s Cove franchise found next door, and ever since my first visit I always wished more towns (i.e. my hometown) would look at Timber Falls and install something similar for themselves.

Well, reflecting on it today it’s possible they did look at Timber Falls and weren’t particularly impressed. For reasons I still can’t quite comprehend the place simply never found its audience, and business has been so bad that there were rumors (that may still persist) that the owners wanted to dismantle the wooden coaster for scraps and to relieve themselves of nightmarish maintenance costs. Apparently a single 3-car PTC train does some significant damage to the track, so much so that on many days the combined expenses associated with track and train upkeep and repairs, as well as staffing and utilities, meant that the coaster operated at a loss even after ride tickets were figured in. Hence the implementation of a maximum five ride per daily ticket policy, which I doubt helps attract many new patrons; perhaps requiring a full train or a 15 minute waiting period before dispatching could be a better solution that wouldn’t automatically lower the face value of the tickets for the few coaster crazies that still visit the place?

With the wooden coaster in only its second year of operation and the skies bright and clear on a radiant July afternoon, the future seemed far more promising on in 2005. Rather than jump right on the coaster after buying our wristbands, my dad and I took our time and played a round of the minigolf located inside the coaster’s triangular layout. It had this tantalizing quality, casually lining up my putter for a calm round of golf, and all the while a brand new wooden hybrid coaster (supposedly a top ten ride for several individuals) would occasionally haul around the track, steel wheels screeching and rattling only several yards away. We held our cool even long enough to sample the park’s other large mechanical attraction, the Timber Wolf Log Flume. This was a much better flume than I expected from a park this size, with two drops (the first a small teaser at the beginning of the layout, and the second the big, dramatic finale) and a sizable trough section around the minigolf course and through an elf-infested tunnel. Yet as sweet (and even – dare I say it – erotic) as the unfulfilled temptation of a new wooden coaster so close by had been, we could no longer hold off. It was time to ride the Avalanche!

(Or the Hellcat as it has since become known; I don’t know if the name makes any difference since there’s virtually no reference to it anywhere except for the website and ticket booth. This also strangely marks the second of S&S Power’s four wooden coasters they built to have changed their names from a weather disaster to Hellcat. I have to think they had something to do with one another and it wasn’t just random chance. Maybe when Timber Falls heard about their sister coaster’s new name they thought, “I didn’t know we could say ‘hell’ on a roller coaster! (Giggles.) Cool, I wanna do that too!” Or maybe the coaster’s state license plate needed renewal, and rather than buy a new piece of engraved metal they bought one used off of their supplier. Who knows, right?)

We ended up riding Avalanche close to twenty-five times that day. We had planned to get to thirty, but returning to the coaster after a late-night minigolf game we found that apparently everyone else in the park had left and so they shut the ride down nearly an hour and a half before the official closing. (The odd thing was we could still walk right up into the dark and empty station, and Timber Falls is an open admission park. I really have no idea how they didn’t have a problem with vandals.) It is a very fun, reridable coaster that was just about perfect for the park. Plenty of airtime over all the hills and a consistently lively pace from start to finish, although as I recall even back then the turns had some problems with uncomfortable shuffling. From what I’ve heard it’s gotten much rougher today.

Yet even running at its best, I never fell head-over-heels in love with the spunky little coaster as some people had. It struck me as too limited and repetitious an experience, consisting only of airtime and mandatory curves. When I started this website a few years later, one of the first big questions I raised was whether G-forces by themselves were sufficient to make a good ride, and I responded with a resounding “no”. Just as the nearby Zeus and Cyclops got me thinking more deeply about storytelling and sequencing in a ride, Avalanche was a primary influence on my decision to study coaster aesthetics more rigorously than simply counting off the moments of airtime as many who praised it had done. So in a weird way, I retain some sentimental affiliation with the coaster for the very reasons I found it overrated.

And I sort of wanted to return because, looking back on the layout with a few more years of theory developed, I found there was more to like than I originally gave it credit for. At first I wanted every coaster to be very dramatically structured with a big finish, but I’ve since learned to find that a layout consisting of repetition with careful variation can often yield even greater rewards. Avalanche basically consists of two triangular circles around the park perimeter. The first three sides of the outer triangle all contain one airtime hill before alternating with a left-hand curve, while the sides of the inner triangle all have two smaller pops of airtime. Even a couple of the turns have a few distinguishing characteristics that act as good progression signifiers. The turn that transitions from the outer triangle to the inner is flatter and lasts a couple beats longer than the others; this is a perfect midpoint bridge. And the final turnaround over the entrance pathway has a small banked airtime hill at the top, a surprise variation in dynamics for the finish that mixes the two previously separated sensations the layout alternates between. Plus, as I said before, it’s just a fun layout. I sometimes get so wrapped up in analysis that I forget that “fun” still counts for something in a coaster.

A significant amount of time was spent sampling the remaining three mini-golf courses on the opposite side of the park. Similar to Kentucky Kingdom, Timber Falls is split into two parts across Stand Rock Road (only there’s no bridge to deal with; you just have to look both ways to get from one side to the other), and the difference between each side is kind of surprising. While the main side with the rides and first minigolf course has some pretty elaborate eye-candy, the older original side with the other three courses is very rustic and natural. There’s essentially nothing there except for 54 minigolf holes scattered beneath the trees along the banks of the Wisconsin River. It was quite tranquil, and after extended time on the coaster it made for a perfect forty-five minute retreat from the noise and chaos, by which time when we’d finished we’d be plenty ready for more Avalanche riding.

We did leave the park once in the early evening to get dinner. When we returned we decided that it would be irresponsible to have spent so much time in such a small park and never once try the intimidating Sky Scraper. It was an upcharge attraction which caused a few minutes of debate, but since we were entitled to a 50% discount with our all-day wristbands we decided that there was unlikely to ever be a more perfect opportunity to try one. We were quite glad we did. This thing was crazy intense. It’s basically a giant arm with two seats attached to either end that rotates like a high velocity Ferris Wheel. While it was easy to describe it superficially as high speed from the ground, what I didn’t realize was that we would receive several seconds of powerful sustained negative G-forces over the entire upper arc of the radius, with virtually nothing to obstruct the view. And experiencing that in person: as I said, crazy intense. Think of the biggest and strongest negative-G airtime hills on any coaster, remove the track and supports from around you, and repeat thirty or so times in a five minute cycle. Going backwards was even wilder because the seats felt like they were going to flip us upside-down behind us as we crested the top. The ride was raw adrenaline, not exactly the highest of pleasures, but we liked it so much my dad contemplated paying to ride it again. And if you ever knew how cheap my dad is, that’s an endorsement of the very highest order.

But this time we didn’t ride the Sky Scraper, we only glanced at it standing still through the shimmering rain, and then turned the car around to go back to the hotel for a rest before a final late night at Mt. Olympus when the weather would clear. We both agreed this was a far better use of time. How the times have changed.

Next: Bay Beach Amusement Park

Previous: Noah’s Ark Water Park

As we neared the main entrance to Noah’s Ark a selection of classic rock playing over the park’s loudspeakers could be heard, already signaling this place was a drastic improvement over Mt. Olympus with its brain dead loop of teenie pop tunes, and we hadn’t even gotten our all-day wristbands yet. Noah’s Ark Water Park is advertised as the largest water park in the United States (although I’m curious how exactly they measure that claim), and it’s also probably the only major amusement property in the Wisconsin Dells area that has its act together in terms of management and customer service. There’s still plenty of greenery surrounding the midways, the slides and infrastructure all appear to be properly maintained, and the employees are mostly all friendly and efficient. Rather than force an appearance as a big-budget theme park where it doesn’t work, Noah’s Ark feels far more natural, taking time to find a clever and original name for their slides rather than slapping an expensive but purposeless façade over the front. Maybe water parks are just an easier business to manage than dry mechanical theme parks, but despite the absence of any top ten wooden roller coasters I found Noah’s Ark to be the easiest park to enjoy in the Wisconsin Dells.

Not that I’m nearly as an astute a critic on water slides as I am on roller coasters. Perhaps part of my perception was shaped by the fact that visiting a major stand-alone water park was a relatively uncommon experience for me, and so I derived extra pleasure simply from the novelty that it wasn’t simply another amusement park. For various reasons I’ve been adverse to water throughout my life. My mother, who for whatever reason became interested in astrology when she was young, insists it’s because I’m a Leo and Leo’s are associated with fire and fire signs are incompatible with water signs… and I frankly don’t know what to say to that. Can’t I simply dislike something without it being a cosmological event?

Nevertheless, I’ve had interest in water parks and their close relationship to theme parks for quite some time, even if that interest rarely expressed itself in the act of donning a bathing suit and trying them first hand. Water slides require an emphasis on the subtleties of layout that roller coasters, with their multitudes of technological gimmicks and high thrills, can sometimes avoid. A water slide designer had a much greater degree of freedom to experiment with a diversity of layouts, different sequences of curves, drops, helices, and tunnels, and can do so without the burden of exorbitant fabrication and construction costs that beset roller coaster designers. I also like the openness and immediacy of the water slide experience. Although coasters can go upside down at faster than highway speeds, I often feel overly protected inside the cars. In a water park it’s just you and maybe a piece of foam or inflated rubber, and when you push yourself off the edge of the chute the experience doesn’t just happen, it happens to you. Even traditional limitations of water slides, such as the fact that water can’t go uphill and it’s hard to thematically integrate a fiberglass tube, are slowly being removed.

I had never been on an uphill water coaster before, and Noah’s Ark’s Black Anaconda, ProSlide’s first experiment with uphill waterslide technology and also still the longest water coaster outside of Santa Clause, Indiana, seemed like a good one to start with. It’s also one of the few water coasters built using ProSlide’s original conveyor belt technology before they switched to HydroMagnetic launches to propel the rafts uphill (water coasters built before ProSlide entered the market used a patented water jet system), so I was curious to see how that works.

We climb a tall tower in the center of the park, where a small toboggan-like raft awaits us. It starts with a steep, long drop all the way to ground level, and then a conveyor belt kicks in to yank us back uphill into the first tunnel. These conveyor belts move extremely fast, turning on only when the raft is approaching and then turning back off once it has passed. Combined with the slickness of the toboggan raft, it feels more naturally like a coaster than it does a conveyor belt, and overall I thought the technology was quite effective for its simplicity. The one-quarter mile long layout features a lot of repetition, switching back and forth between segments of open-air inline hills and valley, and then simple 180° turnarounds in enclosed tubes. I believe one enclosed section might have a helix or S-bend in it, but other than that it’s a fairly simple layout. It finishes with a reenactment of Jon Voight’s scene from the movie Anaconda, as we’re regurgitated out of the serpent’s mouth into a splashdown pool.

I really wanted to like Black Anaconda, and was anticipating it to be the best ride in the park. It has that potential, but after three rides I concluded I couldn’t quite enjoy it because it was simply too wet. Now I know that sounds like a stupid criticism for a water slide (what’s next, am I going to complain the wave pool is also too wet?), but hear me out. On all the uphill conveyors there are these little fountains that squirt water onto the belt. I’m not certain if these serve any functional purpose or if they’re just there for fun, but some of them are aimed a little too high and they’ll shoot a fairly concentrated stream of water straight into your ears and eyes. Furthermore, there’s a lot of water pumped into the flume at the entrance to most of the enclosed sections (there might be some waterfall effects as well, I can’t remember), and with the toboggan being launched at twenty to thirty miles per hour these hit the raft and up into your face really hard. It was almost impossible to open my eyes to see what was going on for the majority of the ride, which simply made it hard to enjoy. It’s a great ride if you need your nasal cavity cleaned out (seriously…) but otherwise I’d recommend to bring goggles and to plug your nose.

Next to Black Anaconda was a pair of slides called the Stingray. These appear to be early predecessors to the famous Tornado funnel slides, consisting of nothing but a steep drop into a big half-pipe using a two-person face-to-face tube. This was actually quite fun, especially going over the edge of the drop backwards where there’s a moment of butterflies in your stomach. The two-person tube seems to hold its momentum better than the big cloverleaf rafts with their broad surface area, which meant we got a least three or four decent moments of hang time in the half-pipe before the still water collected at the bottom brought us to a wet stop. You have to haul your own tube up the very narrow staircase, which limited our will to ride this to only twice during the day, despite the short line.

The nearby Jungle Rapids body slide must have been one of the first slides built in Noah’s Ark, as told by its weathered wood frame, faded blue fiberglass chutes, and hand painted panel signs. You take a simple foam mat and wrap your body with it pig-in-a-blanket style, and then slide down. Couldn’t be more basic, right? However, the two slides that I sampled on this complex each displayed a very different personality. The first was a rather slow collection of dips and helices that took its time in returning me to the pool. The second, after a short enclosed turn, featured a large drop that catapulted me with somewhat alarming force into a final set of helices. Both were fun.

Around the corner is the discovery of a collection of slides set upon a hillside. The most eye-catching of these is the Scorpion’s Tail, a recently opened Aqua-Loop slide with a trap door chute that looks absolutely crazy. I would have loved to have seen if it stung as hard as it looked, but alas it was the only slide that was closed during our visit. However, the radical design has caught on in the industry and there are plenty more being built around the country, so I wasn’t too concerned that I’d never get a chance to try one.

As a consolation prize, The Point of No Return was open and thrilling riders, so I gave that one a try instead. A speed slide with the sole function to drop you from a very high height to very fast speeds, it was perhaps a little hard to justify climbing ten stories of stairs for a slide that would last only ten seconds no matter how scary those seconds would be. Noah’s Ark had some fun by sprinkling several signs that notify us of “points” along our ascension:

“This is the point where you ask how much farther it is”, “This is the point where your hands start shaking”, “This is the point when you begin feeling dizzy”, “This is the point when your swimsuit becomes extremely soiled”, and so on (although maybe not in those exact words), until the inevitable final notification sign at the top.

Although the slide itself might last mere seconds, the minute or two spend at the top waiting for your turn can certainly make up for it. Settling into the flume trough on the precipice of a 100 foot plunge so steep you can’t see the bottom, and realizing that I’m responsible for pushing myself over the edge, created so much suspense that the slide that followed was almost anticlimactic. It’s basically the same psychological thrill as any drop tower, only I’ve not been on so many of these speed slides yet that I’ve turned utterly indifferent to the whole experience.

A couple of smaller, older speed slides flank the side of the big tower. Called The Plunge, this pair of double dip chutes requires that you go down face first on a mat, wakeboard style. I honestly didn’t care for this riding position at all; it requires you bend your spine backwards in a very unnatural position to get your face out of the water, and this can be kind of hard to do on a steep decline. Once was more than enough on that one. This would be their last season, replaced in 2012 with a ProSlide KrakenRacer named Quadzilla.

Finally, another set of family raft slides known as Kowabunga are placed along with the rest of the single-person speed slides. Unlike most slides of its type which are a series of curves and shallow dips, these consist of three straight drops, each a bit larger than the last. It’s relatively tame and slow compared to the other body slides in this complex, but it manages a very high capacity (the second flume wasn’t even needed for today) and is fun for what it is. They require at least three people in a raft, so if you’re alone or in a pair expect to be sharing a ride with the folks standing next to you.

I should mention that Noah’s Ark has a very strange walkway layout. The entire front side of the park is open admission to anyone, although of course you need to show your wristband to ride any of the slides. Walking up to it from the original parking lot (if you get there early or it’s a light day), there’s a building with tickets, lockers, and a small store, and right next to it are the entrances to several of the major slides, without so much as a gate or welcoming entrance midway to set the tone or force patrons to exit through the gift shop. To get to the rest of the park, however, you must take a rather unintuitive shortcut through a narrow water play area, where someone will check for your wristband to let you through. I’m not sure how this doesn’t create a large bottleneck during peak season, but apparently it works for them. The rest of the water park beyond this section is laid out in a more traditional midway arrangement, but even here I got the impression of a park that was added upon in layers without much regard for how future attractions would integrate. I don’t mean this to sound like a criticism; it’s kind of charming, actually (unlike Mt. Olympus’ backwards infrastructure you’ll probably still find something fun to do if you take a wrong turn), but just make sure you have a look at the maps set up throughout the park if you need to get from point A to point B in a reasonably efficient manner.

Moving back in this direction, we find a small island of slides surrounded by the Endless River, a basic oval-shaped lazy river with very little in the way of extra features. The first of these slides are the creatively named Slidewinders, which resemble the similarly archaic Jungle Rapids experienced earlier, only they have a few more twists and turns and mats are not required. Again, I enjoyed the simplicity of these slides and the ability to compare layouts to one another to decide which is best. There was no clear-cut winner here, as all three of the main slides resemble each other quite closely… although if I recall the slide closest to the top of the stairs may have been marginally faster than the others.

Larger and more modern, the nearby Bermuda Triangle takes the same basic concept as the Slidewinders, but widens the chutes to allow for two-person inline tubes to pass through. Again, these were another enjoyable if not slightly indifferent diversion, although we failed to pick up as much speed as I’d anticipated. Most of the kinetic energy created by the dips seemed to transfer to rocking from side to side around the curves rather than forward momentum, although this did allow for a couple of good splashes over the edge of the tube.

The big ticket attraction in this sector is the Time Warp, a ProSlide Behemoth Bowl which would end up being the only attraction we’d have to wait more than fifteen minutes for due to its immense popularity. It turned out this popularity would be justified. We’re set off in a 4-person cloverleaf tube into a dark tunnel filled with zany warning signs about the approaching wormhole. Just as the tunnel gets really dark, our raft dives down a surprisingly long, fast descent, particularly thrilling if you’re going backwards. Inside the main bowl chamber there’s a crazy array of special effects and water jets flying everywhere so we’re totally disoriented (although unlike Black Anaconda we can look around without getting our eyeballs involuntarily cleaned), and at the center of it all is a fog-breathing Tyrannosaurus Rex.

On our first ride we were paired with two other reasonably big guys, so we got to spend a nice long time inside the Time Warp. Our second ride was with a mom and her young son, so without the added weight we got caught in the current flowing out the exit after only one-and-a-half spins. It’s a relatively short ride but the combination of the steep dark drop, the unpredictability of the bowl, and sensory overload thematic special effects, makes it quite easily my favorite slide at Noah’s Ark.

Dark Voyage is the park’s big, enclosed raft ride. I was looking forward to this one particularly after Time Warp proved to be such a success. It dominates the nearby area quite impressively, although the slide itself I didn’t think quite lived up to the promise. With a name like Dark Voyage I’d expect an experience that’s very dark and very long, and while it lives up to the first part of the name, the second part doesn’t quite deliver. The layout forms just a basic oval, with the splash pool, conveyer lift and loading platform taking up one of the oblong sides. There’s only about thirty seconds to enjoy the reverberating echoes and make faces at the people sitting across from you without them knowing, which to be fair is about equivalent to the Time Warp; yet Dark Voyage is also at a crucial lack of dinosaurs. One feature we did really like was that the Dark Voyage was the only major slide with heated water. My dad made it one of his favorites for mostly that reason.

Congo Bongo Rapids is another family raft slide, this one of the traditional beige half-pipe variety. Although it lasted longer than the Dark Voyage, that might have only been because it was a lot slower. The hillside location is nice, and it has this easy-going quality that makes me think it could be a huge amount of fun if you pile as many friends into the raft as possible, but don’t be expecting to get very wet on this one.

Reaching the back side of the park is a complex consisting of the Big Kahuna wave pool, the Adventure River, and the Bahama Falls, a trio of small tube slides that feed into the river. I tend to enjoy a good lazy river more than a good wave pool, so the Adventure River was where we’d spend most of the time relaxing, especially because it has a long course that’s far removed from many of the busier slide complex areas. We couldn’t get too relaxed, however, as there were periodically geysers and waterfalls that required paddling away from (or, perhaps depending on your proclivities, towards).

Way out in the furthest, remotest corner of the park is Black Thunder, a complex of four enclosed single-or-double tube slides. Two are a series of serpentine curves, while the other two don’t pussyfoot around and consist of two straight drops directly into the pool below. The speed slides are sort of wasted in the dark, especially as the sudden burst of kinetic energy must immediately dissipate when you hit the bottom ten seconds later, and you’ve got to contend with waterfalls over the exits which at 20mph can sting your face a little. The longer layouts were much better, similar in experience to Dark Voyage but perhaps even wilder, the in-line tube offering several high-banked turns without warning.

Returning to the very front of the park near the Wisconsin Dells Parkway (although not necessarily close to any of the park entrances) is a quasi-dry ride section. I say quasi-dry because, although filled with attractions more typical of a dry mechanical amusement park (including a children’s coaster I didn’t bother with), you probably wouldn’t want to change out of your swimsuit just yet. This was also the one place where the Noah’s Ark theme was present, most notably inside the small ark filled with memorabilia from the park’s history and its numerous awards (including Black Anaconda’s 2005 Golden Ticket Award for best new water park ride) and in the theme for their spillwater shoot-the-chutes attraction, Flash Flood. It’s been a while since I’ve ridden one of these basic splashdown designs at an amusement park (if I’m going to bother getting soaked, I need a more elaborate layout or theme to justify it), so I didn’t see any reason to avoid it at the water park.

It fits well with the rest of the water slides, a short, basic but effective thrill that’s basically all an excuse to find new ways to play in the water. A bit of anticipation builds up during the process of slowly climbing the lift and then rumbling slowly around the aerial turnaround (this part is almost more reminiscent of a roller coaster than water attraction), but it’s quickly defused with a simple drop into a reservoir that kicks up a lot of water. Nevertheless, my favorite part is this odd moment when the boat first lands and you can see and hear huge quantities of water crashing up over the front lip, but the moment when you feel the water is delayed by a couple of seconds as you wait for it to finally rain back down. And just like in the Bible, when it rains at Noah’s Ark, it pours.

Next: Timber Falls Adventure Park

Previous: Mt. Olympus Theme Park

Picture this: A family owned and operated amusement park in rural midwestern America, starting from modest means, builds itself into a successful theme park destination for people from all over the region. The theme chosen for the park is one of personal significance, although in many ways it’s a token theme because the park is built in a forested, hilly landscape, which they fill with the best wooden roller coasters their limited funds can buy. Their first 1995-built roller coaster from Custom Coasters is widely praised by enthusiasts despite its small size due to a creative layout that makes full use of the available terrain. Their follow up coaster, although larger, has more conventional thrills that don’t quite better its predecessor but make it a welcomed addition to the park nevertheless. It wasn’t until CCI reformed into the Gravity Group that they partnered up to make a record-breaking attraction that could be remembered by enthusiasts for years to come.

Sound familiar? Obviously I speak of Wisconsin’s Mt. Olympus Theme Park (formerly Big Chief Carts and Coaster), but it could easily be mistaken for blood-buddies with the beloved Holiday World in Santa Claus, Indiana. The two parks share much in common, and I would even go so far as to claim that in some ways, Mt. Olympus was better than Holiday World at making a business that could appeal to both families and enthusiasts. While Holiday World only has three thrilling wooden coasters, Mt. Olympus had that number matched a couple years in advance and even added a fourth, family-friendly wooden coaster for younger guests who still didn’t measure up to the 48” restriction on the bigger rides. And while Holiday World complemented their coasters with only a fairly tame, generic collection of traditional flat rides, Mt. Olympus became true innovators in their field with an extensive line-up of elaborate, multi-leveled go-karts all included with admission; carving out a unique niche not equaled anywhere else in the amusement industry. Even the Koch’s Christmas theme was something of an inevitable marketing byproduct given the name of the town and the many disappointed children who visited before 1946, while the Laskaris’s Greek theme was a much more personal proclamation of their familial heritage, proudly asserting an immigrant’s story of the American Dream to a population that otherwise would never have noticed or cared.

Yet for all the potential each had to be small park treasures within the coaster community during their formative years, if you were to visit both theme parks today it would be clear that somewhere down the road Mt. Olympus split paths from Holiday World and things went very, very wrong.

Many parks get worse with age due to outmoding and neglect. Mt. Olympus is one of the few places I’ve been to which has been actively working to be worse than it was on my previous visit during Hades’ debut year. Of course, even in 2005 it was never an ideal model of hospitality business. Almost every attraction had underserved capacity, low HR standards were generally reflected in their employee’s commitment to their job, and the entire infrastructure was awkward and needed improvement. And they’ve had a few good ideas since 2005 here and there. The Parthenon indoor rides park makes sense to have in an unpredictable climate; you can remotely receive your hotel card from within the park and use it or your wristband as a debit card; and the Night at the Theme Park (basically a nightly upcharge ERT session¹ on a few of the major attractions) is an enthusiast-friendly concept and something I’d love to see implemented at Holiday World. (Notice, however, that all of these good ideas are still very clearly profit-motive driven.) But as soon as we entered the parking lot, it was clear that some mistakes had been made since last time. Big mistakes.

The parking lot is big mistake. Hell, I doubt Cedar Point has as many parking spaces as Mt. Olympus. It was big in 2005, filling the entire infield between Hades’ drop and the turnaround near the Wisconsin Dells Parkway. It has now been expanded to wrap all the way around Zeus’s turnaround, over near the back side of Hades, and past the Poseidon’s Go-Karts. Maybe five rows near the front entrance were filled. This begs several questions. The first is: when on earth does Mt. Olympus get so crowded that they could justify the enormous cost of the overflow parking capacity? Second, supposing they can fill this entire lot on some days, how do the amusement and water parks not far exceed maximum capacity? All of the roller coasters are four-or-five car, single train operations that don’t exceed 500 people per hour, and the go-karts and upcharge attractions are even worse. Is it all for the water park and hotels (which already have their own parking lots)? And thirdly, how is this not an example of (at best) bad taste and (at worst) bad business ethics? I know tree huggers can be annoying, but when you clear that many acres of forest for nothing of added value, and effectively transform what was once a scenic wooded park into a deserted island amidst a sea of asphalt, I have to think even the biggest “global warming is a lie” Republicans would find something distasteful about that managerial decision.

The wooden coaster Zeus is perhaps the biggest victim. I once considered it a top tier coaster partly because at night it matched the best “fly-thru-the-woods” moments of The Raven or The Beast. The 1997 built CCI coaster has never gotten much love from enthusiasts mostly due to a simple L-shaped out-and-back layout that lacks in originality what it makes up for in brevity. But something about it clicked with me the last time I rode it, and at the end of the trip I had Zeus listed as my second favorite wooden coaster in the Dells. Perhaps in part because of its simplicity, it was one of the first layouts that made me keenly aware of the value of progression patterns and element sequencing in constructing a good coaster. There were two very different sides to Zeus: (1) the inline, airtime filled hills; and (2) the laterally forceful flight through the forest in the turnaround. It followed a clean and effective pattern: 1-2-1. I later realized it could be expanded further as 2-1-2-1-2, with the bookending unbolded 2’s being the weaker swooping turnarounds at the beginning and end of the layout. And what made this alternating pattern work was that both the airtime and the forested turnarounds were immensely fun, although for radically different reasons.²

It was therefore a little bit soul-crushing to see Zeus now more closely resembling Six Flags Magic Mountain’s Scream than the terrain coaster I remembered. The dense woods this coaster once flew through are gone, replaced with empty parking lot. Just a few small patches remain behind the ride and in the center of the turnaround. It already lost a little when Hades and the first phase of the lot were built, but forest around the turnaround was still as dark as a starless summer night ride on the Raven.

Now it’s just decimated. The elegant pattern I outlined above completely falls apart. With no terrain element, the turnarounds become just another device to get us pointed in the opposite direction with a few lateral forces, and the airtime hills dominate the appeal of the ride. Even ignoring any pattern analysis, the ride simply sucks a lot more as a parking lot coaster than it does as a terrain coaster. On full display out in the open, there’s no longer any sense of mystery and the only surprise remaining is a double-dip set in a small ditch on the return run.

I still retained some hope on the way into the park when I noticed some fresh lumber on the first drop with a dated stamp only a few months old. It was a token prize, but if I couldn’t have my old Zeus back, at least I’d have a coaster that ran fast and smooth. Settled into the rear row, we hurtled down the first 85’ drop effortlessly. Up into the first bunny hill, we caught a magical boost of airtime as we zipped through Hades’ support structure. Hey, the refurbishment seems to be working wonders!

Then the wheels made contact with the track bed again, and we quickly – and painfully – discovered it only had a partial refurbishment. I’ve been on some poorly maintained CCI coasters, but I don’t think any had deteriorated as badly as Zeus. For the rest of the layout our internal organs needed defending, which is not logically obvious how to do. Against better judgment we tried it again, where we found that the front row (and only the front row) was still quite smooth and thrilling, while even one or two seats further back were like putting your brain in a paint mixer. Thankfully they are taking some action to repair the track, so maybe once the retracking is complete Zeus will be an enjoyable ride in every seat and not just the very front, but it will never again be the great ride it once was without years of reforestation.

The Dells’ original wooden roller coaster, the 1995 built Cyclops, has aged much better. I’m not sure if it received a retracking project more recently than Zeus, or if the slower average speed and lighter PTCs simply means it doesn’t dig into the track as much. The unrestrictive buzz-bar restraints undoubtedly help our perception of a smooth ride as well, since any jostling absorbed by the cars isn’t then directly transferred into our bodies, as the tighter individual lapbar design tends to do. The ride is legendary for the back-row rides it gives; a legend undoubtedly fueled in part by the eyebrow raising and now infamous “You Must Be 18 or Older to Ride in the Last Car” sign. Too bad on our visit the very last row in the train had its lapbar broken off and was thus out of service. I’m sure there’s a perfectly benign reason for this that fits into Mt. Olympus’ general “we’ll fix it only when we absolutely have to” attitude towards ride maintenance, but it could be fun to believe that this incident fits into the enthusiast mythology surrounding Cyclops’ ejector airtime.

When most people talk about Cyclops and its possible justification as a top ten wooden coaster, they talk about the drop. Of course it’s a ride with several drops, but anyone who’s seen it knows instantly which drop we’re talking about. The 75’ midcourse drop off the side of a small hillside in the middle of the park is famous for having some of the strongest sustained negative G-forces of any wooden coaster ever built, intensified by the use of single-position buzz bars on the train that allow for several inches of slack between one’s lap and the restraint.³

However, I’m going to take a couple steps back and argue that what really makes Cyclops succeed is the strong progression of the layout. We must consider the context leading up to the drop that makes it such a psychologically distinctive moment, because if it is only the raw force that matters then Cyclops would not be particularly distinguishable in quality from certain bungee or tower rides that can be commonly found throughout the country. Consider: would the drop be as effective if it was also the layout’s first drop, instead of being positioned near the end?

Whereas Zeus has (had) a balanced and elliptical progression structure that I once might have described as elegant, Cyclops has a very uneven, brash, and dramatic layout progression that’s all about building tension to a singular climatic moment. The coaster starts with a series of small curving drops and hills that wrap under Zeus’ lift. The forces in this section are already pretty strong, with a couple hills that will make your lap connect with the safety bar and some hard laterals around the underbanked swooping curves. The timing between elements is fairly short (corresponding with the small scale of these elements) giving it an “aggressive but playful” personality, like an adolescent dog that hasn’t learned his teeth are sharper and his jaw is stronger than when he was a puppy. We know what this beast is capable of, the question is: does it know?

As we start to cross back under the lift, the pacing suddenly slows and the unpredictable forces disappear. There’s an extended moment of silence as we round a couple of flat curves and shallow upward climbs. Instead of the small scale, lumber and tree dodging first act, the vista opens up to a wide panoramic high over the rest of the park. We become palpably anxious, not just because there’s violent force approaching, but because we’ve internalized the knowledge that violent force is approaching and yet we’re experiencing a moment of relative calm and serenity. The drop is not just an act of violence; it’s a premeditated act of violence.

I do not use the word “violence” metaphorically. I think all roller coasters can be considered “violent” in a very real and tangible way (and not just the uncomfortably rough ones like Zeus). This might sound odd because we consider them voluntary and purposely for fun, but the structure of our experience of a roller coaster is more or less the same as any other experience of violence. It is force exerting power over the human body. That’s pretty much the shared definition of violence and roller coaster experiences.⁴ It’s only the fact that we still retain some control and autonomy over our bodies (even if we momentarily surrender that control to the coaster, it was our choice to be here in the first place and we feel assured nothing permanently bad will happen to us) that makes this violence entertaining; similar in nature to how good jokes about the tragic reality of the world can also be some of the funniest.

If the progression of Cyclops can be characterized as slowly teasing out psychological tension through a combination of two methods in the opening act, and then pulls the floor out from under us (literally and figuratively) at the start of the second, we might wonder how the final couple of curves fit into the layout’s narrative structure beyond simply functioning as a way to get us back to the station after the climax. I think this is a case where declining action and denouement serves a very important purpose for coaster narratology. If the ride simply ended at the bottom of the drop, it would feel incomplete and our bodies would be burning with a sudden shot of adrenaline and no place to expend it. These curves, technically the fastest part of the ride, are visceral without being forceful (although a banked hill between the two right hand curves creates some odd sensations), and the high speeds are a satisfactory conclusion to the slow build-up of tension in the first act without becoming too much for us physically. The layout still feels a bit too short and incomplete regardless (the progression is extremely compact, with each “act” lasting no longer than ten to fifteen seconds), but by the end of the ride there’s no mistaking that it makes the most out of every foot of its 1900 feet of track.

If Cyclops is an exemplar of how to efficiently establish dramatic progression in a coaster layout, then Pegasus might seem to be an example of how coaster layouts can just kind of randomly dick around until it’s over. The family coaster, opened in 1996 and positioned near the front of the park along the Wisconsin Dells Parkway and over several go-kart tracks, can be tough to describe. The first drop is only about two-thirds the height of the lift, and then it goes into a long elevated section of apparently arbitrary dips and box curves taken at less than 20mph. It’s not until the return run when it drops most of the way to ground level, and then finishes with a couple of hills that fail to provide anything resembling airtime. Capping it all off, just before the brakes there’s a little right-hand shimmy that, depending on how the guide wheels catch it (there’s always a bit of slack that results in the typical wooden coaster feel), can significantly rattle the front car or glide through as if it wasn’t even there. Even having ridden it several times I still can’t quite trace the layout in my mind despite the fact that it’s composed of very simple elements and takes about thirty-five seconds to complete from top of the lift to the brakes.

Nevertheless I now think there’s a bit more purpose to the layout beyond just randomly wandering over the nearby go-kart tracks. There are two distinct flavors to the experience: the faster, hilly sections at the beginning and end, and the slower elevated section with box turns and little dips. And that elevated section even kind of resembles the sensation of a horse galloping through the air. It seems entirely possible that might have been an intentional design feature inspired by the coaster’s proposed name; although even if true, who knows if I might have been the first customer to have ever consciously made that association? Worse, some of that purpose of the elevated layout is missing now that the Medusa Drop Track is removed and part of the ride is just circling over an empty grass lot.

Yes, I was surprised to find that instead of expanding the park to match the extra capacity suggested by the parking lot, they’ve spent money to whittle it down. There are fewer worthwhile attractions at Mt. Olympus than there was when the Parthenon was built in 2006. The Medusa’s Drop Track, the famous airtime filled go-karts; Dive to Atlantis, the admittedly kind of lousy watercoaster; the Zamperla Disk’O, the park’s only adult flat ride included with admission… all of these are gone without replacement. The only things that have been added are a small Zamperla children’s ride package in part of the area once covered by Medusa’s Drop, and several upcharge attractions that are essentially expensive lawn ornaments, as no one was willing to pay $15 to $20 (plus tax) for a two minute ride. Once famed for their diverse collection of 16 go-kart tracks, only five adult tracks remain, two of which were closed for no apparent reason. The Helios and Poseidon tracks were both deserted for the entire length of our visit; did all the individual go-karts break down at once, I wonder? I can’t speculate if the closure of certain tracks is the exception or the norm.

This left us with a meager three go-kart tracks we could try. The biggest and best was quite handily the Trojan Horse Track, with its huge multi-level helices that lead three stories up to the belly of a Trojan horse replica. It could have been a great racetrack as well, if only we had halfway decent cars to race with. As I recall this has been a problem since the days of Big Chief’s Carts and Coasters; they use a standardized fleet of small, black plastic exterior vehicles that I’m guessing must have been selected for their cheapness and interchangeability rather than for any certification of quality.

The biggest problem is that they’re slow, making it almost impossible to get exciting races going. Pretty much as soon as you take off you can press the gas pedal all the way to the floor, and you’ll never need to lift off for the entire race unless you’re somehow forcing an extreme hairpin turn. The winner, therefore, is usually decided either by who gets a cart at the front of the station, or who gets a cart that’s recently been refurbished and runs a hair faster than all the others. The ergonomics aren’t great either, and I don’t think these carts are equipped with shock absorbers intended for the elevated wood plank tracks. They vibrate so much that my butt and back would go partially numb by the end of the race, and it makes maneuvering with the steering wheel a helluva lot more difficult than it should be. Although there was one occasion when I drove over a small puddle of water that had collected at the top of the Trojan Horse Track, which caused my poor, underperforming vehicle to suddenly loose all traction and crash into the nearest carts and barriers, continuing to fishtail wildly around the first part of the descending helix… and all the while as I tried to get it under control I still kept my foot flat down on the gas pedal! And that honestly was some of the most fun and excitement I’ve ever had on go-karts.

The Titan’s Tower track, despite its name, remains close to the ground for most of the layout with a couple of small figure eights thrown in underneath the Pegasus structure. Supposedly this is the longest track in the park, although I can’t imagine it’s much longer than the Trojan Horse or Poseidon tracks and it’s certainly not as memorable except for a few points along the track where a small sharp ledge in the transition between pavements and elevated track convinced me I was going to blow a tire and dent the undercarriage. The last adult-sized track was Hermes’ Turbo Track. This one was advertised as being the park’s “speed track”, but as it uses the exact same carts as the others (possibly tuned to go a few mph faster) I wouldn’t go far out of my way for it. Nevertheless, replacing the wooden plank track with a series of sweeping ground-level s-curves made it much more comfortable and even allowed for a bit of racing, not that it was anything you couldn’t find in an average FEC. Not having to pay an upcharge continues to be the most welcomed feature of the remaining tracks at Mt. Olympus (I rarely do go-karts anymore mostly for that reason, they’re just not worth the upcharge), but they would need to upgrade their fleet of cars before I’d consider returning to the Dells just to ride the go-karts.

But, no. Instead of spending capital investments to improve or build new attractions, one of the major cash projects from the last couple years was to arbitrarily relocate the main ticket booths by several hundred yards. While the original location near Cyclops’ big drop was maybe a bit awkwardly integrated with the rest of the park, the current entrance on the far side of Hades’ drop is quite baffling. On the immediate opposite side of the ticket gates you run into a chain link fence protecting Zeus’ out run. To get into the park you have to turn left and take a narrow pathway under Hades’ drop, through a gift shop squeezed inside Zeus’ lift supports, and then wind between Cyclops and Zeus’ structures to reach what used to be the far back of the park connecting the wooden coasters. There’s not a tremendous amount of protection from the coaster structures which lets you get very close to the onrushing trains, which I sort of liked as a coaster geek and photographer. But I can’t imagine the logistical thinking that went into making the entrance thoroughfare such an awkward and unintuitive design, and would fear this pathway at the beginning or end of a busy summer day.

The rest of the infrastructure continues to be a bit of a mess, probably partly a result of a long history of merging and combining different resorts and attractions into one. While we never used it, the indoor/outdoor water park in particular seems to suffer from a scattered, illogical placement. Walking from one end of the property to the other can be extremely tiring, yet despite the labyrinthine abundance of pathways there’s a conspicuous lack of attractions they lead to. Thankfully the major coasters are all clustered together, although even within this small area I’d sometimes get turned around, not sure which forks led to the queues and which to the ride exits, the park exit, or various service and maintenance roads. Guide maps, as well as fences, lamp posts, and other common midway ornamentations are a rarity along these walkways, but there’s no shortage of loudspeakers blaring an endless loop of pop and hip-hop songs everywhere except the most remote corners of the park. While themed styrofoam has been scattered throughout the park, a lot of shade trees have been removed which can make a summer day quite brutal.

The Parthenon is one escape from the weather (in our case, light rain showers instead of oppressive sun) although after more than twenty minutes it might begin to feel more like an imprisonment than a retreat. The exterior had a very impressive (and very styrofoam) colonnade adorning the front which seemed to promise greatness (or at least, not mediocrity) inside. However, the actual structure behind this façade is basically just a gigantic beige tent. Inside, it is filled with a collection of mostly Zamperla children’s rides, none of which are even remotely themed to Ancient Greece, and a Zamperla spinning wild mouse coaster called Opa!. An almost-attempt at a custom theme, apart from the name this ride still retains its carny colors and whacked-out rainbow mouse vehicles. It was still decent fun for a couple of laps, in part because as the only semi-major steel coaster in the Wisconsin Dells it didn’t try to rattle more of our brain cells out of our ears, and because if you pile your party into the right-hand side you can get some really good spinning in the second half. But after two or three laps we had run out of activities to do inside and, in the absence of natural light and with the fumes and noises of the kiddie go-karts trapped inside the tent, we became quickly anxious for the rain to stop enough that we could continue riding the wooden coasters. As previously noted, the Zamperla Disk’O once featured as the secondary adult ride in the Parthenon has been inexplicably banished, which left the biggest additional amusement found inside for us to be a vending machine selling exclusively socks.

If there’s only one thing that Mt. Olympus has figured out how to do really well, it’s how to make deals. Once you’re on their property, there’s a ceaseless stream of offers and promotions that try to get you to shell out just a little bit more.

It’s when you first arrive: pay a $5.00 parking fee to cover the parking fee attendant’s wage and the cost of building several acres of unused overflow parking lots, although if you have the right ticket receipt then it doesn’t matter.

It’s at the admission booth: Night at the Theme Park is $22.00 for three hours of time in the park, which is only $3.00 less than a normal park admission ticket valid from 10:00am to 9:00pm. But if you buy a one-day ticket, then the value of Night at the Theme Park is magically reduced to only $5.00.

It’s on the rides: $15 to $20 to have the ride operator to take two minutes of their time to strap you into a swing or catapult and press the dispatch button, but a physical commodity in the form of an on-ride DVD is complementary.

It’s in the gift shops and game booths: buy one for $7.00 or buy two for $10.00! Play twice at an exorbitant price, get the third game free! Trigger random discounts of up to 90% for doing nothing but spend money in the right places!

Even when you book your hotel: a family of four can pay $150 for one day of water and theme park admission and no hotels, or they can pay $100 for on-site accommodations and get two days of unlimited park admissions (a $300 value) for nothing at all!

Some of these practices may lead you to feel you’re being nickeled-and-dimed, others may make you to believe you’ve just made the steal of a lifetime. But what they all have in common is that arbitrarily inconsistent pricing destroys a customer’s perceptions of the value of a dollar. We are told over and over again that nothing Mt. Olympus is selling has any intrinsic or fixed worth. We know it costs money to run the place, but nothing we spend is actually pegged to that commodity’s marginal value; the contents of our wallet are emptied into the mysterious money pile in the sky, and then by incident Mt. Olympus decides what we get for our donations. Ultimately this practice only leads to a competitive relationship between the park and its guests, and it results in reduced spending overall. Aware of all the little extras I could buy or receive and their relative (un)worth to everything else I had already spent money on, I felt the constant need to guard my wallet and calculate the real cost-benefit of every penny I put down that Mt. Olympus was intent to deceive me of its actual value. Yet at the end of the trip when I finally sat down to count out what had been spent on what, I found that with the various hotel deals and so on I had actually spent less than I probably would have at a “normally priced” regional amusement park.⁵

To summarize: I think Mt. Olympus has made some poor managerial decisions uncharacteristic of most “family owned and operated” businesses, and I’m not sure I like the trend I’m seeing for the future of the park. For a place that has so much potential (or, at least, had the potential several years ago), they’ve shown a knack for chasing after some of the wrong investments and putting customer satisfaction inside their core theme park business at a lower priority to other non-value-added interests, like buying out pre-existing local hotels or holding a personal grudge against the nearby trees.

Perhaps it’s just the rampant, superficial commercialism of the Dells that’s toxified the air and water Mt. Olympus uses. But there’s something a little despicable, maybe even pathological, about a business that’s willing to destroy huge quantities of trees to boost the theoretical number of customers they can shove through the gates without ever spending a dime to increase capacity or improve guest experience once they’ve paid for their tickets, all the while openly and notoriously showing interest in easy profits and gimmicks before demonstrating any pride in running a respectable, fair business that treats all of their customers as if they’re actually intelligent human beings.⁶

There’s one last fallen angel to be found in the park, and it is called Hades. When it opened in 2005 it created a furor, once the Gravity Group’s very first roller coaster seemed to exceed the scale and ambition of nearly anything previously produced by Custom Coasters International or Great Coasters International in all their prior years of business. With the world’s longest underground tunnel on a roller coaster as well as the first ever 90° banked turn on wooden coaster, the future looked bright for the Gravity Group.

Yet the future for Hades, in spite of its powerful and innovative layout, was perhaps destined for eventual mediocrity from the very start, given who would be tasked with upkeep of the ride. A single 5-car train operation was suspicious from the very moment it started making test runs. That’s the sort of capacity that’s okay for a short, mid-sized wooden coaster at a rural go-kart park in 1995, not a nearly mile long headlining monster at a rapidly growing regional theme park in 2005. Still, if you could put up with the long lines or visit on a lightly attended day, the ride that awaited you that initial year was nothing short of world-class. Today, its status as the best of the best is less certain. Like Zeus, the wooden track has taken a bit of a beating from the PTC trains. The front row is still smooth, but the other cars (especially in the rear wheel seats) can pick up a vibration that is at best distracting and at worst painful.

Also, while expanding the ride’s capacity is out of the cards for Mt. Olympus (not even the addition of a sixth car even though the station is already equipped with the gates for one) they did take it upon themselves to add these weird high walls to the inside of the coaster seats. I’m guessing they must have had an incident with someone sticking their hands out of the car and are there to protect the stupid people from themselves, but for everyone else with even a moderate body build we’re forced to keep knocking shoulders with our riding partner and the wall padding throughout the ride. It’s still possible to get some really good front row night rides on Hades, but Mt. Olympus does what it can to make that as difficult as possible. Who knows what they’ll come up with in a few more years?

Although the layout lacks the elegantly elliptical or dramatically climatic progression of its smaller predecessors, there is still something unique about the ride’s narrative that’s worth noting. While most good roller coasters progress from large, fast elements with drawn-out forces to smaller, fleeter maneuvers with rapid bursts of force and direction changes (mostly necessitated by the loss of speed from friction), Hades turns this ‘standard’ progression on its head. It places the sharp pops of airtime and laterals with fast transitions at the very beginning, thanks to the elevated station and pre-lift section. The section after the main drop is more typical of a midcourse progression, with agile bunny hops in the tunnels and a slow pause at the top of the far turn around. It isn’t until the end of the ride when the coaster opens up to viscerally high speeds and drawn out element timing, rampaging through the woods (what’s left of them) over wide, steeply banked curves and shallow drops, crashing into the brakes with plenty of fury to spare. Subtle but unique, it’s a progression that can’t quite be boxed in using any simple linear or circular pattern analyses. Hades is a roller coaster that has an epic story to tell, and there are developments, lulls, and climatic action sequences that all fit together into an extremely satisfying narrative arc.

Nevertheless, the highlight of the Hades is ironically when it’s at its lowest and darkest, found inside the double underground tunnel that spans the length of Mt. Olympus’ formidable parking lot. This is an incredible piece of engineering by the Gravity Group in the way that it completely engulfs you and, even at high speeds, holds you in the dark for longer than seems natural. The only downside is that it completely upstages the other big record breaking feature, the 90° banked turn that’s found along the first leg of the tunnel.

Perhaps they were a little too eager to demonstrate their mastery of physics and advanced track calculus, but the extreme banked turn is maneuvered too perfectly. We can’t feel anything in the way of unexpected or even expected forces along this turn, and since we obviously can’t see anything, probably 95% of riders come back to the station not even aware that at one point underground they were turned completely on their sides. This was a big problem in its opening year; it was virtually indistinguishable from a flat stretch of track. However, now that the track has degraded somewhat and the precision engineering has more interference with the wheels jostling around, I could kind of make sense that something felt askew during that turn. I actually like the return leg inside the tunnel better. It doesn’t matter that we’re not going as fast on the way back because we don’t have any points of reference to judge our speed, so the darkness lasts longer. And as soon as you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, the designers throw a curveball at us and send us over a slightly reverse-banked curved bunny hop; this is a trick we can feel and see.

More than the placement of 90° banking underground, the biggest drawback of Hades’ layout is that a few of the hills feel like they were designed expecting that the train would retain more speed than it actually does. The big steep incline after the first tunnel is particularly problematic in this regard, as the train usually feels like it’s going to stall out on this part (and it sometimes randomly does). That’s not a huge loss since it works well as a contemplative pause in the middle of the underground madness, but the camelback hill that runs parallel to the lift after the second tunnel always seems to underdeliver on a promise of big airtime, and I don’t see any way to justify that. The only decent negative G-forces along the layout that are not underground are on the speed hill before the second tunnel and a few of the sharp bunny hops on the pre-lift section (including the drop out of the station if you’re in the last row). Underground there are a ton of pops of airtime mixed with a few laterals (except for where 90° banked track is involved), which helps solidify those tunnels as the reason to make Mt. Olympus a coaster enthusiast’s destination.

I’m at the point where trying to describe the ways in which Hades is a very good coaster seems pointless. Watch a video of the ride and you’ll understand (with apologies to Michael Mann) that I don’t have to sell you this shit and you know it, because this kind of shit here sells itself. What I would like to do is propose constructively how Mt. Olympus management can once again appear as an agent for improving the park instead of conspiring against it as the past couple years have suggested.

Here’s what I would do for Hades: call in the Gravity Group to do major rehab on Hades (but after they fix Zeus so it doesn’t cause any lawsuits, of course). Aside from retracking, completely rebuild the final helix and lower the brake run down to station level. This would eliminate the dip into the station and allow for enough extra safety braking room to accommodate a second train and a transfer track. Replace the existing train with two 24-passenger Timberliners; one burgundy and one charcoal black. I’ve also always wanted a bigger finish to Hades. The upward spiral starts strong but it loses too much speed so it finishes on a dull note. Lowering the brake would give it more speed at the finish, and I would also propose that while this area is being reconstructed, to add a second layer to the track so it has a strong double helix finale similar to the Beast or Shivering Timbers. (With two trains the ride can last a little longer without sacrificing capacity.)

Then, take Hades’ current five-car PTC train and put it on Zeus. Maybe do a similar reprofiling and transfer track addition so it can run two trains, or at the very least put one of the new cars onto the existing train so it can run with six cars (I think the Zeus station was also originally designed for six). Maybe another donor car can go to Pegasus, since one four-car train is also a bit short on capacity on days that are able to fill the entire parking lot. Cyclops can stay the way it is as long as it receives the required amount of TLC, since it’s a short layout that’s easy to load and dispatch quickly with the buzzbars. By the way, I’d like to see some of the parking lot around Zeus bulldozed and replanted with trees, but that’s probably wishful thinking.

While we’re in Fantasyland, I’d also like it if the Medusa Drop Track could be resurrected from the dead, and if the go-karts could all be upgraded to a faster design with better shock absorbers, and if the convoluted path infrastructure could be consolidated into one easy to follow central midway with a direct route to the main entrance, and place thematically consistent non-up-charge flat rides and secondary attractions in the new space that will free up, and if they could get a more competitive, professional HR department, and if only I could crap thunder and piss lightning… but, let’s be realistic, none of that will happen until the day Hades’ realm freezes over.

Then again, Wisconsin does get pretty cold in the winter, and I can’t imagine that asphalt parking lot doesn’t occasionally form a thick layer of ice…

Next: Noah’s Ark Water Park

Previous: Wisconsin Dells

I like structuralism. I like being able to analyze beliefs and ideologies to find the underlying historical processes that account for their existence. I like Karl Marx and his thesis that the means of material production have historically defined the structure of society, including its language. I like Friedrich Nietzsche and his project of tracing the genealogy of morals, noting a dichotomy between “Master Morality” of good and bad, and Christian “Slave Morality” of good and evil. I like Sigmund Freud and how psychoanalysis can demonstrate that perceived “religious experiences” are explained by an unconscious desire for an all-powerful father figure. They tell me deeply revealing things about the structure of society, unmasking archaic dogmas that I never even realized were still there, affecting the basic nature of the way I think and relate to the world around me.

But sometimes I need to be hypocritical. Sometimes I need to say “fuck it” to philosophy, and indulge in the philistine pleasures that my unconscious, materially motivated mind is always pushing me towards. There are times – dark times – I need to pack my bags and do a spur-of-the-moment weekend trip in Midwestern consumerist hell.

Sometimes, I actually want to go to the Wisconsin Dells.

Hey, 3.1 million people annually can’t be wrong!

How a remote ecological destination (the Dells are named for the sandstone gorges that line the Wisconsin River) became host to an economically thriving metropolis of cheap amusements and tourist traps remains an even bigger mystery to me than what’s at the Mystery Spot. I guess the Wisconsin Dells were an inevitable outcome from a state whose proudest cultural accomplishments are cheese and the Packers; it was only a question of where. And a question of how many mini-golf courses can operate within three square miles of each other without over-saturating what the free market can bear. While part of my ego wanted to recoil in horror that there was a place not far from home where an endless array of billboards for Tommy Bartlett’s Water Spectacular received formidable competition from Circus World, stepping back further I realized that it’s the type of place that I suspect a number of international travelers would be delighted to discover: an uncensored glimpse into some of the most bizarre and unapologetic facets of American identity.

Although I was here primarily for the roller coasters, no trip to the Wisconsin Dells would be complete without a tour on the Wisconsin DUCKS.¹  You know what they say: when in the Wisconsin Dells, do as the other tourists from Milwaukee do. Ever the stalwart traditionalist, I chose to experience the Original Wisconsin DUCKS over the competitors, assuming that the historical value of riding around in an amphibious WW2 buggy was a significant component of the tour’s overall quality. I also assumed that the originators would have staked claim to the best, most scenic routes of the Wisconsin river dells, although I was slightly surprised to find that, wherever they planned to take us, it wouldn’t be too far from the gaudy commercialism of the downtown Dells because their headquarters are stationed directly across from Mt. Olympus. I guess there aren’t many environmental concerns about commercial development being very close to the natural watershed, because five minutes after leaving the sight of Mt. Olympus’ endless concrete parking lot behind in an amphibious buggy we had reached our natural destination.

Our tour guide was a generally good natured, hard working fellow trapped in an eternal situation of recycling bad scripted jokes. (i.e. Did you know this river is the natural home of the Wisconsin state bird; the mosquito.) He always delivered his punch lines with a droll, dry irony that hinted at our mutual understanding that we all knew these were bad, corny jokes, yet we must all act our prescribed roles and laugh anyway. It was this unspoken acknowledgement that most of the natural humor came from anyway.

The DUCK ride itself was amusing if not a bit short. From departure to return the entire $25 tour was around one hour, counting the time near the end when he stopped the tour in the middle of the woods to give us a sales pitch for guide booklets and tips. There were a few hills and thrills to please coaster enthusiasts looking for a mid-afternoon retreat from the nearby wooden coasters, most notably when our four-wheeled vehicle dived nose-first into the Wisconsin River and Lake Delton, and we had a moment of odd realization: “Hey, I’m on a boat!” However, the real star of the tour was the Wisconsin scenery, and as tourists in a place as glitzy and competitive as the Dells we didn’t simply demand scenery, we demanded a spectacle.

“Wow, look at that vertical sandstone formation!” as we pass through Red Bird Gorge. “It must be nearly 20 feet tall! And here I always thought the Midwest was flat!”

“Hey, look! You can see an indigenous fisherman on the far bank!” We point and grab our cameras to snap photos of some middle aged guy casting off after digging out another beer from his cooler.

“Oh my God! That’s a real deer over there! Everyone be quiet and get out your cameras!”

Evidently, we’ll take whatever spectacle we can get. We’re Midwestern tourists, after all.

Choosing where to lodge in the Wisconsin Dells turns out to be a bit of an art form. You could decide to stay in any old cheap motel you find on Expedia for the entire length of your visit, but then you might not get as much value for your dollar as possible. For our two nights we ended up staying at two separate hotels located down the street from each other, each priced around $70 to $80 per night (tax included). One was the Santorini Village owned by Mt. Olympus, and the other was the very pink Flamingo Motel right next to Noah’s Ark water park. You see, Mt. Olympus hotel properties (there are many, some more expensive than others) give each person in your party n+1 free admission tickets to the theme park, n equal to the number of nights you’re booked (so you can visit the park both the day of check-in and check-out). Mathematically it can be even cheaper to get a hotel room than to buy your tickets without accommodations, although this isn’t necessarily cheating the system since Mt. Olympus openly advertises this fact.

Now, given that we were fixed for tickets to Mt. Olympus after only one night’s accommodation, there was clearly no point to spend both nights at the Santorini Village. So a bit more searching turned up the Flamingo Hotel, where a one night’s stay of $75 (bookable only by telephone) granted two free tickets to Noah’s Ark water park… a $74 dollar value; plus a book of 15-20% discounts to numerous area attractions and restaurants, including the Original Wisconsin DUCKS and Timber Falls Adventure Park. It turns out a weekend trip to the Wisconsin Dells can be done on the cheap provided you’re willing to do a bit of strategic planning (and move your bags from hotel to hotel). This was good for us because we easily made up the difference in restaurant bills.²

As I recall from my previous visit to the Wisconsin Dells in 2005 food options were not many or varied. Whether a number of new establishments had developed in the six intervening years or if we simply sucked at scouting out decent restaurants back then, we found a drastic change in fortunes this time around. One place we ate at, a combined bar and restaurant called the House of Embers, seemed to suggest the latter hypothesis (that we sucked at finding restaurants in 2005) as it had clearly not received significant update since its hayday in the 1960’s; in fact I think the restaurant may have been airlifted from Phoenix, Arizona when it last appeared with Chevy Chase wearing white leather loafers in National Lampoon’s Vacation. Flashing neon out front with incandescent mood lighting inside, stacked stone fireplaces and walls, lots of cream and pastel coloring, and shag everything everywhere. Upon entering the austere and mostly deserted establishment we inquired if there was any dress code (we both had on shorts and coaster t-shirts). There wasn’t. And you know what else: the food was pretty good.

While a more popular eating establishment for tourists might be the expansive Moosejaw Pizza & Brewing Co., we found the best place to eat in town was actually a short drive outside of town at the Cheese Factory Restaurant. The menu is exclusively vegan and vegetarian which might raise a red flag for red-meat-eating, red-blooded, red-state Americans like us,³ but it’s worthwhile when you remember that, in Wisconsin, cheese counts as a vegetable. We both ended up ordering the signature Big Cheese Sandwich, “a grilled double decker of Wisconsin sharp cheddar and Swiss cheeses with Roma tomatoes on sourdough bread,” apparently famous ever since Rachael Ray filmed a Food Network episode there. The restaurant itself was a pleasant retreat from some of the more garish features along the Wisconsin Dells Parkway, with an old-timey ice cream and soda bar. Although perhaps a little too eager to be perceived as nostalgic and quaint, the desserts alone, a raspberry cheesecake and a “Cloud 9” (White chocolate mousse with Devil’s cake center, served with raspberry sauce), were worth the detour from the coasters and water slides.

No weekend roller coaster trip to a tourist hotspot would be complete without a brief side visit to a nearby FEC to ride a children’s roller coaster to add to my count. Knucklehead’s Bowling & Indoor Amusement would fit the bill for the Dells. It’s starring attraction, the Miner Mike roller coaster, having no maximum height restrictions for riders willing to pay the $3.00 fee. I casually mentioned to the operator as I handed over my token that this would count as my 564th different roller coaster, apparently under the assumption that for whatever reason that fact wouldn’t make me appear quite as weird as if it had only been my fifth. But he too fancied riding coasters, even having a short conversation on the demise of the Big Bad Wolf as he checked lap bars.

The coaster itself, while nothing to write too many paragraphs about, was a bit of an oddity by virtue of the fact that it’s perhaps the only indoor terrain roller coaster I can think of. After a short curved lift and bunny hop, the ride dives down an inclined slope, Phantom’s Revenge style, to a lower level in the indoor complex, where at the bottom we encounter a small helix that can actually produce some pretty sharp lateral forces. The train climbs back up the slope into the station, where we’re sent around several more times so as to get our three dollar’s worth.

Next: Mt. Olympus Theme Park

The idea of the journey or the open road has traditionally been central to American identity. From Manifest Destiny, to the Oregon Trail, and eventually Route 66, the universal commonality shared by these cultural icons is the existential search for the freedom and yet-unrealized possibilities granted by the act of “going west”. Although it has mostly been decommissioned, there are still portions of historic Route 66 that are drivable, and they still lead to the same destination in Santa Monica, California. So, what do we find at this destination, the place of yearning that has always been the cornerstone to what it means to be an American?

The answer: A fairly lame Morgan Manufacturing family roller coaster. Remember (as the car commercials always tell us), it’s not the destination but the journey that really matters.

Terminating the western end of historic Route 66 is the Santa Monica Pier; primarily home to the Pacific Park rides midway as well as an eclectic array of buskers, hawkers, vagabonds, and tourists. Plus some lovely sunset views of the Pacific Ocean, if you’re into that sort of thing. Some may find it all charming, others may find it tacky or a tad unsavory, but there’s no doubt that it’s a popular destination for both visitors and locals alike. On the walkway in the pier appeared to be swarmed with people, although part of this was the perspective of looking straight down a long, flat boardwalk.

There’s also a 1922 Charles Looff Carousel on the Santa Monica Pier that’s not formally part of Pacific Park, but well worth a look inside the Looff Hippodrome which houses the carousel, even if you’re not planning to buy a ticket to ride. This 1916-built structure has a distinctive architectural style that combines Byzantine, Moorish, and California styles (so I am informed by a marker inside the building) and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1987. It’s certainly an elegant presentation to a simple attraction that I regret is missing from most modern amusement parks.

Pacific Park, for better or worse, is a marked contrast to classical beauty of the Looff Hippodrome, featuring instead a bright, eye-catching color palate and lots of neon and tracer lights. A hyper-contemporary aesthetic that works well in its context, although it runs the risk that a broken neon light will quickly transform it from “looking cool” to “looking trashy”.

Pacific Park is primarily known for the Pacific Wheel, a solar-powered Ferris Wheel with an impressive LED lighting package, and the famous West Coaster, which has appeared in countless movies, TV shows, and commercials whenever the producers don’t feel like paying to send their film crew out to San Diego or Santa Cruz to film a real oceanfront roller coaster. It is also home to a small collection of generic flat rides such as a Scrambler, Sea Dragon, and Bumper Cars, most of them a tad overpriced at $5.00 a ticket. There’s an unlimited wristband option around $22.00, but since both the West Coaster and the Pacific Wheel cost the same as the flat rides you can probably save yourself a bit of scratch by buying a one-time ticket for those and saving the others for the next time you’re at a cheap carnival or a pay-one-price park.

I wonder what the average time it takes for people to realize the name of the West Coaster is also a really bad pun. D.H. Morgan Manufacturing were given a logistical challenge when it was decided they would design a roller coaster layout that could fit inside the limited space offered by the pier, and for the most part they avoided the challenge by playing it as safe as possible. The roller coaster (it uses exact same ride system as the Morgan hypercoasters) forms a simple out-and-back layout around Pacific Park, with the station and final helix fitted inside the only small plot of pier estate that was available to them, and the rest of the layout was elevated to go above the pre-existing midways. A functional if not very original design, made worse by the fact that without the high speeds of their hypercoasters the dynamics are even tamer, as they use the same profiling techniques. It’s a decent coaster for kids and grandparents, but nothing that anyone who had been to any of Southern California’s other major theme parks would write home about.

There are still a few things to like about this gentle coaster. While the speeds max out at a mere 35 mph, it at least manages to do that near the end of the layout rather than at the beginning, which starts out with a slow downward helix that gradually builds momentum and excitement, rather than start out with a big drop and have every subsequent element measure up short by comparison. The two bunny hops over the midway have a slight whiff of more airtime than on the return leg of World of Fun’s Mamba; not that that means we’re at all close to achieving weightlessness. And the final helix is the most rousing and energetic part of the entire ride, with the only section of track that actually dips all the way down to boardwalk level, and if you’re in the front row, there’s even a small pop of honest-to-goodness real airtime on the sharp incline back into the brakes. The roller coaster is over so quickly that they give you two laps, which make the $5.00 spent on a ticket feel satisfactory, not that I would feel compelled to plonk down another fiver for another two laps on the same night. The West Coaster and Santa Monica Pier are one of those things that I’d always feel obligated to do at least once whenever I’m in Southern California, and would recommend anyone else visiting the area to do the same, despite the fact that I also feel that it’s not quite worthy of the heritage of boardwalk amusement parks along the west coast.

Next Series: 2011 China

Previous: Los Angeles

There’s a contrast in themed environment design philosophies between the eastern and western hemispheres of Disneyland. The lands in the western side (Adventureland, Frontierland, New Orleans Square) are all about hyperreal imitation of real-world environments. Their goal is to copy the look and feel of the Congo, Old West, or New Orleans as perfectly as possible, such that one might be tricked into forgetting they’re even located inside Disneyland. The eastern hemisphere (consisting primarily of Fantasyland and Tomorrowland) in my opinion has a much better design philosophy. In these lands the Imagineer is given freedom to invent and create from a blank canvas, rather than simply imitate an already familiarized picture with only occasional creative flourishes. Because these environments exist nowhere else in the physical universe, we’re allowed to see the theming “as it really is”, unique and singular to Disneyland. One’s aesthetic judgment is therefore not as limited to how well it mimics the real thing, but can include a much broader set of criteria such as creativity, color selection, architectural innovation, etc. What does Fantasy look like? What does the future hold? There are no pre-established rules, and so Disneyland is given the freedom of interpretation.

That’s the theory. However, the dual aspect of this creative freedom is that the Imagineers now also have a much greater creative responsibility in these lands to make environments that are as vivid and beautiful as those based on real world locales. The beauty of French Quarter New Orleans is the ultimate product of centuries of aesthetic and architectural development by a myriad of great minds and even diverse cultures, while the look of Tomorrowland must be birthed from a single scratchpad during a relatively short development period. And to be honest, I’m not sure if the Imagineers have proven themselves to be up to this task. The eastern hemisphere has not nearly as many trees as the western side, and is generally lacking in the same degree of texture and depth found in Disney’s rendition of Africa or the Old West. In particular, Tomorrowland is very two-dimensional, vanilla color schemed, and with lots of open concrete areas. There are few trees or plants, and where they are present they look very out of place with this sterile vision of future architecture. Disney’s land of the future, sleek though it may be, seems to be founded on an idea that biology is too messy to have any function other than in test tubes.

A note to future readers discovering this page deep in the cyber archives: please, have better aesthetic tastes than what Disneyland believed you would have! All the hard work we’ve done in our contributions to history was made in the hope that the world you’d proudly inherit wouldn’t look like a dull, bastard descendant of architectural brutalism (but with less practicality). We invented for you pastel and earth tones for a reason!

In short, Tomorrowland is not a particularly interesting place to walk around and explore. A lot of people like to note that the ironic problem with Tomorrowland was that it quickly became “Yesterland”, but I don’t think that’s a problem anymore since the design has shifted from a showcase for future technologies to a science-fiction version of Fantasyland. (If that is true, then Children of the Future, you can partially disregard my previous warning.) However, I think the area would be benefited from a lot less George Lucas and a lot more Jules Verne. More color, more texture, more whimsy. Disneyland Paris’ Discoveryland is a step in the right direction.

The first attraction in Tomorrowland might have taken its original inspiration from Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but has been pretty well replaced with Finding Nemo paraphernalia. I speak of course of the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage, situated between the Matterhorn and the rest of Tomorrowland as we enter from Fantasyland. Although intrigued by the dramatic possibilities should a leak form in our vessel requiring a mid-ride Titanic reenactment, at first I was skeptical that the concept could work as a worthwhile attraction. The clear water pool takes up a sizable chunk of real estate in the land-strapped Disneyland, yet from a spectator’s position I was unconvinced that seeing a pool of this size from beneath the water level would really be anything worth queuing 45 minutes for. My reasoning was that since a submarine voyage is limited to passive spectatorship of amazing vistas from an unusual vantage point, a theme park attraction would have to be done on a much larger scale than Disney could afford before it would start attain any worthwhile value. A glacially-paced tour of a swimming pool filled with artificial coral and our vantage distance limited to a few meters squinting out of a tiny porthole didn’t exactly seem like a formula for great entertainment no matter how you dressed it up.

After giving it a ride, I found I had underestimated Disney’s showmanship ability. First of all, climbing down into a dark, claustrophobic ride vehicle via a small opening on the top is a very different loading procedure than anything I’ve encountered in a theme park attraction before, and much of my interest was sustained just by observing all the unusual tasks required to make the Submarine Voyage work. That’s true of many attractions Disney, as they rarely buy off-the-shelf attractions so there’s often a sense of discovery for uber-obsessive theme park geeks. There are also numerous animatronics and effects not visible from the surface, and I forgot that there would probably be sound played inside the submarines as well. This becomes the attractions’ most valuable asset as there’s a complete, reasonably involved storyline… although, most of the story elements are lifted directly from the film (of course). It even takes a “dramatic” turn near the end when the submarine enters a tunnel and we encounter a deep-sea angler fish and an underwater volcano (we can’t see the tunnel, of course, but the water becomes much darker). The attraction is still quite limited as an experience (Tokyo DisneySea’s “dry” submarine dark ride involves guests a bit more by giving them a flashlight control) and I think it’s a good thing more Submarine Voyage rides haven’t been built, but it’s still worth a voyage if the queue is short, just for the quirky differentness of whole thing. If only they could make the portholes a little bigger and build it at a place like SeaWorld where we wouldn’t have to pretend to ooh and awe at robotic fish.

(A quick note, due to the limited time in the park, we ended up skipping a number of Tomorrowland attractions such as Buzz Lightyear, Autopia, Innoventions, and the closed-for-renovations Star Tours. All of these attractions could be found at Hong Kong Disneyland or Tokyo Disneyland except for Innoventions, which I will cover there.)

I’m not exactly sure why they call it the Captain EO Tribute since it’s exactly the same thing as the original Captain EO except for the world outside is no longer in the 1980’s, but regardless of how it pays tribute to itself, it was a big attention grabbing rerelease (for a limited time… hopefully) so I would be obliged to see it. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Captain EO is a 1986 George Lucas produced 4D science fiction musical film that ran at Disney parks until the mid-90’s, starring Michael Jackson as the titular El Capitan. Supposedly the most expensive film frame-for-frame at the time, it’s the ultimate nostalgia and cheese fest for Generation Xers still reeling from the collective shock of the King of Pop’s death. My aunt Christine (a big Michael Jackson fan) loved it. It’s got dancing and music and comic relief puppets and Michael going “ah hee hee!” more than once, as well as a call for social consciousness that’s incredibly vague but still lends it more depth than the pure idiocy that’s de rigueur for most of today’s 4D theme park movies. Plus it’s directed by Francis Ford Coppola and includes Anjelica Huston in the cast, two positives that couldn’t be claimed by Honey I Shrunk the Audience.

From my Generation Y perspective, what made the price of admission worth it was the humorously absurd sight of an attacking robot army getting transformed by the King of Pop’s magical palm light beams into a leotard-and-big-80’s-hair clad dance troupe during his space mission to conquer an evil space warlord through the power of music and love (or something like that).¹ Granted, perhaps I’m not the best person to review Captain EO since most of the cultural achievements of the 1980’s that I admire are better categorized as either holdovers from the 1970’s or early forbearers to the 1990’s, and Captain EO is certainly neither of these things. Whatever. It’s silly, feel-good fun that you can tap your toes to, and it’s one of the rare cases of Disney pulling something less than polished out of their closet for the sake of remembering a bit of our cultural history. Not that my remembrance of Captain EO would ever be a specific reason for me to dread the onset of Alzheimer’s.

My tour of Disneyland is nearly complete, and before wrapping it up I should give a quick summary of what I’ve learned. The amount of creative design and money spent per square foot of land the park occupies has to be some of the highest density anywhere on the planet. Almost nothing is accidental which is what makes it so great for analytic park fans such as myself and Disney’s many, many devotees. The Anaheim park in particular has the best and most complete set of attractions at any Disney theme park worldwide.²

Yet when forced to choose the best of these attractions, I often found myself preferring rides in which the least amount of capital investment was spent. The Matterhorn and Pinocchio are my favorite roller coaster and dark ride at Disneyland, a selection I suspect I share with extremely few other individuals. Both utilize relatively simple technology to tell a story or craft an experience. The difference between these and higher profile attractions I was far less charitable towards (Big Thunder Mountain or Indiana Jones Adventures) is that their allowed to tell their stories and focus on their experiences as theme park attractions, rather than as a imitation of something that wants us to believe it has no affiliation with the artificial world of the theme park. In my opinion the best rides at Disneyland embrace their artifice, and in doing so it allows the potential to create art. Which brings me to:

Space Mountain

I must first ask: How do we visualize a “space mountain”? The name creates a paradox. The “mountain” implies something huge, concrete, and physically dominating, but then “space” multiplies it by zero and turns that mountain into a strange physical manifestation of the intangible nothingness. Perhaps we’re supposed to visualize a planetary mountain like Olympus Mons, but the presentation is far too clean and man-made for that connotation to work. The white, conical structure with a few steel icicles dangling away from gravity gives the basic impression of a mountain, but a very abstract, conceptual one that looks like nothing else found in the known universe. Except, of course, for Space Mountain itself.

The nebulous name and appearance is well-suited to the roller coaster contained within, which has a similar ineffable quality. There’s a beautifully orchestrated story arc to Space Mountain, but it’s not told using ordinary language. Any literal “space adventure” narrative is underplayed and abstracted to the point that it nearly ceases to exist, instead relying on music and our non-visual senses to create a compelling experience, only loosely tied together by a general sci-fi aesthetic bookending the beginning and end. Before riding Space Mountain I imagined that it would have been filled with dioramas of planetary scenes and deep space nebulae lighting effects to keep our eyes busy and stimulated, but in a display of restraint uncommon to Disney, the core of the ride experience is highly minimalistic. Once inside the main dome where all the gravity-driven track is located, there is virtually nothing to be seen except for small pinpricks of swirling lights and maybe a dim, half-glimpsed outline of the rails ahead.

What happens once we’ve been totally deprived of reliance on our visual faculties is we’re forced into to a heightened awareness of our other senses; primarily our auditory faculties and inner ear sense of acceleration changes, although even the feel and smell of the difference in air temperature once we enter the main dome becomes a noticeable sensation. Accordingly, the music is a defining feature that makes Space Mountain the ride that it is. A very cinematic onboard soundtrack (courtesy of Michael Giacchino, who composed the music for the Incredibles as well as virtually every Pixar and J.J. Abrams production in the time since) gives shape and structure to what otherwise might have been a very disorganized roller coaster experience.³ Although you only need to provide musical cues at a few key points in the ride to create a sense of synchronicity, the soundtrack so perfectly complements and elevates Space Mountain to the next level that I’m nearly able to forgive Disney for the number on California Screamin’. It’s difficult for me to imagine riding this coaster without the soundtrack, just as it’s difficult for me to listen to the soundtrack on my computer and not visualize some of the key moments of being on the ride. Like image and sound fuse together to create cinema, Space Mountain is a singular entity of music and coaster.

The layout is in many respects similar to the Matterhorn Bobsleds, in as much as it’s composed of a long downhill run that wraps around itself with a variety of direction changes to fill a conical structure. Also like the Matterhorn there are a number of block brakes scattered throughout the layout which don’t interrupt the ride’s pace. In fact, on my very first ride (in the front row) I developed a bizarre fear because it seemed we were moving too fast and with too many direction changes for there to be any block brakes whatsoever. Normally I expect little “pauses” for brake runs throughout a coaster with dispatches of less than thirty seconds, but here the safety blocks were almost invisibly integrated in the flow of the ride layout. I worried that we would not be able to safely decelerate if there was an e-stop, and squinting through the darkness I realized if there was a stopped car we’d collide into it and I wouldn’t be able to brace at all. It’s such a nerdy technical minutia that I doubt it’s a phobia I’ve shared with many other first time Space Mountain riders. I wondered after getting off if the safety braking was set up in a way that each car had to have two clear blocks ahead of it to advance. Even though a lot of the sense of speed is illusory due to the dark surroundings, it seemed that the brakes were too short that a single section could bring a train to a complete halt without discomfort to the riders. Regardless, it’s a technical achievement that succeeds at creating a sense of increasing, non-interrupted action for a solid two minutes that extremely few other coasters are able to achieve.

I also must commend the shaping of the track itself. I know this sounds like a minor point, but it’s really essential to the successful integration of music with the track. Although the track runs very smoothly with precise calculus in the rotation of the banking transitions in the curves, it nevertheless has a very distinctive feel that gives a strong sense of orientation and velocity changes. The banking transitions for example, while smooth, are also sudden and not completely heartlined, so you can easily feel when you’re navigating a turn. The same goes for the drops, which have sharp crests and valleys with flat ramps spaced between them rather than continuous parabolic crests. So many modern steel coaster designers use a free flowing force-vector style of design to produce inversions and overbanked turns that, if put in a dark room, would feel like absolutely nothing.⁴ Space Mountain achieves a tremendous sense of speed and directional changes despite a top speed of 35mph and maximum banking and track grades of less than 45°, precisely because it retains a more antiquated, geometry-based track design, even after its 2005 refurbishment.

The result is a roller coaster that feels musical. Each of these somewhat hard transitions function as an individual note or beat, and the small bits of flat track between them is what gives it a rhythmic flow. Just as music is defined not so much by the noise itself but by the silent relationships between the noises, so is this style of sudden stop-and-start track design that is becoming increasingly obscure in favor of designs that feature continuous, dynamically changing curves and elements. The layout is simple and repetitive, yes, but this matches the minimalist visual style and it allows the music more freedom to shape the experience, such that anything more would have been less.

Originally I didn’t want to do a play-by-play of Space Mountain because it’s not so much about a sequence of events but rather a sustained aesthetic state, and words cannot fully describe the experience anyway; but I realized for those that have never had a chance to ride it (and, more importantly, for those who may never be given that opportunity) there are virtual no good visual representations of the ride that can be found online, and so Space Mountain is probably one of the best coasters for providing a written account. I shall try. To start, we enter the station from overhead, where the queue then descends along the edges of the station walls to the platform level. We’re ushered into the vehicles, two six-passenger cars coupled together, which are spacious and easy to climb in and out of, and feature a simple hydraulic lapbar with a rubber pull tab which makes loading so fast they don’t even need a dual-loading station to keep up the fast dispatch rate.⁵

In order to understand the full Space Mountain experience from this text, be sure to have a listen to the music as you read along. During the opening preludes we begin with a short lift up a red-lit incline. As the stringed instruments come in (0:26) there’s a flat turnaround with a series of flashing blue lights. At the (0:40) mark, we start the ascent up the second (and larger) chain lift, which is enclosed in a special effect “vortex tunnel”, with a projection at the far end showing a spiraling galaxy that collapses into singularity. Emerging from this tunnel (0:58), we find ourselves inside the main space dome, an awesome visual experience of rushing and swirling stars that’s amplified by the musical intensity. There’s a small left turn (around a rather fake-looking plastic asteroid, the one regrettable prop I could have done without) and then we climb the short final lift hill as a voice counts down to takeoff.

We linger over the top for a contemplative moment of silence (1:15), before gravity kicks in and the soundtrack dives into a more aggressive symphonic space-rock style. This is when the music synchronization works the best, as the first big brass notes (1:24) correspond exactly with the first high-speed turnaround, and then the frenetic strings at (1:27) come during a quick hop up into the first block section; a moment that should seem slow but is transformed into an epic and adrenaline-boosting opener, one that still gives me slight chills when I hear it. From (1:30) the music establishes a more consistent pace, which matches with the fact that the coaster track is doing a series of shallow descents and curves without any particularly big moments that stick out.

There’s a progression in both the music and the coaster at about (2:03), when there’s a sudden uphill hop into a block section that produces a little bit of airtime in the front row. A fast dip and curve anticipates the big “turning point” that kicks off the second act (2:07): a large midcourse drop that gives the coaster a sudden burst of acceleration. (“Large” is relatively speaking, as I doubt it’s any deeper than 20 feet at a 35° slope, but the context makes it feel huge.) From there we motor into a series of more curves and dips that make up the majority of the Space Mountain experience, but with more power and intensity than before. At around the (2:25) point the music picks up in agility to match the coaster track, which starts a few very fast, tight turns and switchback around the floor of the mountain, reaching the lowest point of the layout while sustaining the maximum speed for the big whirlwind finish.

Finally, around (2:37) we fly into the final brakes housed inside a warp tunnel. A few bright strobe lights simultaneously disorient us while our photograph is snapped, and we come to a smooth stop by magnetic brakes. As the music shifts to the coda (2:41), there’s a very odd effect where the dim holographic lights that line the tunnel follow the ride vehicle, which at first made me think we had come to a complete stop (my pupils were still recovering from the bright strobes seconds before), but then we went around a final turn back to the station platform and I realized we were still moving. Even after the first couple of re-rides, this effect still always managed to head-trick me, which is a neat little device to end a spectacular coaster.

I realize how lame it must seem to describe a coaster like Space Mountain in detail as I have just done. There’s a sense in which no explanation of the ride can ever truly capture it. This is true of all roller coasters – indeed, of all phenomenal experiences, to an extent – but Space Mountain exaggerates this gulf between language and experience by its limitation of sight and restricted use of typical, “meaningful” plot and storyline, and instead abstracts it to an orchestrated experience intended almost exclusively for the outer and inner ears. At a fundamental level, I think this is why roller coasters are so important. They are some of the most phenomenologically rich experiences mankind has devised, and by equating the roller coaster experience with the musical experience, Space Mountain possibly raises the bar a little bit higher on the potential of roller coasters to become their own unique artform.

The phenomenal experience is irreplaceable by language or empirical sciences.  The question of “What is it like To Be”, that is, to have experiences, whether of colors, smells, music, or roller coasters, is one of the most central to human experience, and also one of the biggest roadblocks to accepting the typical scientific view of reductive materialism as a solution to metaphysics. It has been tried and largely deemed impossible to give a true and complete account of raw phenomena in the absence of firsthand experience. “How do you explain the color red to a person who’s been blind all their life?”, is a favorite thought experiment among philosophers. That’s before we open up the Pandora’s Box that is the experience of meaning in our phenomenal experiences. We don’t experience the world simply as receptors of sense data, but we’re constantly in a state of interpreting and emotionally responding to the world around us. Space Mountain tells a deep, meaningful story to me, as I’m sure it does for many others, albeit one that takes no literal or concrete form. Can we possibly share this story? I don’t think it is possible without experience. We can only make obtuse, generalized gestures in the direction we want others to look. However, once we’ve found what we’re looking for, we’ve located what I think is at the core of the authentic theme park experience, one that transcends the shallow confines of hyperreality.

A complete discussion of phenomenology and roller coasters would require a full dissertation to even scratch the surface, so I will leave you with this: Jean-Paul Sartre, early in his career and sitting at a Parisian café, held up his drink and said “phenomenology will allow me to make great philosophy out of this glass of wine”.

I say the exact same can be said of roller coasters.

Next: Pacific Park

Previous: Fantasyland

Disney California Adventure