Excalibur - Roller Coaster Philosophy

Valleyfair!

Shakopee, Minnesota – Sunday, July 31st, 2016

I often forget that there’s pleasure in plain vanilla. It’s easy to want to ask for the more complicated flavors since it seems like you’re getting more for your money, but every once in a while it’s good to go back to the basics. Done properly, vanilla is a wonderfully subtle yet complex flavor. Overcomplicating it only messes it up.

Valleyfair(!) is about as vanilla of a Cedar Fair park as you can get. As one of the original two Cedar Fair parks (putting the “fair” in Cedar Fair), Valleyfair has the distinction of being the “most” Cedar Fair park; only two years of its entire existence was it not part of the chain. Everything about this park has the Cedar Fair DNA running down to its core, from its entirely predictable collection of chain-favorite rides from each decade of the past 40 years, the comfortably familiar design and building styles that proclaim “we’re a local amusement park and we’re proud of it,” down to the neatly manicured bright green lawns everywhere. There was very little about this park that suggested any urgency on my part to go out and try it. My first visit in 2016 also marked the final Cedar Fair park I hadn’t yet been to. There was always some place else that seemed more interesting. And yet, when I finally did make it, I was reminded exactly why vanilla was such a good flavor to begin with.

The park is only home to seven adult coasters, the most recent of which opened back during the George W. Bush administration. Combined with the northern midwest climate, the park felt like an odd hybrid of my old two stalwarts, Michigan’s Adventure and Cedar Point. That’s especially true when it comes to the park layout: long and linear like Cedar Point, but mostly just the result of really bad master planning like Michigan’s Adventure. Valleyfair is not a large park by any means, but to go from Steel Venom sitting out by the parking lot all the way back to Excalibur floating by itself in its own private little paradise behind the water park, and you’ll be in for quite a long, meandering hike. Which brings me to another thing to remember about the upper Midwest: just because you’re farther north doesn’t mean it’s any less hot and humid in the summer than any other part of the country. Prepare accordingly.

High Roller

I always forget this ride is here. It’s really good—still packing in plenty of airtime! Wooden coasters from the 1970’s pretty much begin and end with Philadelphia Toboggan Company. The nearly lone exception is this one-and-only Rauerhorst Corp-designed ride, making High Roller quite literally a one-of-a-kind coaster. The comfortable rolling stock is usually credited to International Amusement Devices, although it appears to have been replaced or at least heavily modified by PTC in recent years. It doesn’t necessarily track flawlessly, but it at least seems to have a fair amount of shock absorption built in. While I suppose the ride is comparable to Blue Streak or any of the other handful of late-mid-century Cedar Fair wooden coasters, High Roller stands out as being the most idiosyncratic just for the fact that it’s still quite enjoyable.

Corkscrew

This is where the Uncanny Valleyfair effect was the strongest. This ride so incredibly resembles a blend of both Cedar Point’s and Michigan’s Adventure’s Corkscrews that I felt like I could have been in three separate places at the same time. 70’s-licious colors and plain station house from Muskegon? Check. Vertical loop and collarbone-crushing bunny hop from Sandusky? Check, check. Throw in a pond and a helix finale which I suppose is enough to distinguish it as a unique native of Minnesota, and there you have Valleyfair’s Corkscrew. With more time, the soft spot in my heart for classic Arrow Dynamics steel looping coasters grows greater in size. (This is still by far the worst major coaster at Valleyfair.)

Wild Thing

How is it that Valleyfair got North America’s only fourth-ever hypercoaster? (Or, for that matter, that the previous two went to a historic family-run amusement park and a casino? What were all the big corporate parks doing at the time?) I can’t imagine what an impact Wild Thing must have had on this park back in 1996. Even today, with a couple more large attractions to fill out the park roster, Wild Thing still looms disproportionately large over everything else.

This first of the Morgan Manufacturing hypercoasters always looked to me as if it should have been the best of the bunch. A blazing low speed hill instead of an oversized slow camelback? A huge, twisted knot of a turnaround instead of a simple double helix? That funky shaped tunnel at the very end? All interesting variations! But to the point about vanilla: adding complexity to the formula doesn’t necessarily make it better. The speed hill is nice but it’s over too quickly. That endless turnaround then hogs most of the ridetime with slow, aimless doddering. Even the funky tunnel isn’t so cool as it is hot, humid, and full of funk. Wild Thing is still very much worth more than just a single ride for the credit, but the few remaining Morgan stans out there will probably have a better time in Allentown or Kansas City instead.

Mad Mouse

With this, I finally successfully checked off my list all four Arrow Dynamics Wild Mice ever produced. The build quality of these rides far surpasses what’s needed for a wild mouse, which is probably why so few were produced. Hopefully the three that remain (all now at Cedar Fair parks, despite Valleyfair’s being the only one originally purchased by Cedar Fair) will last long into this century. Every mouse should have a trick-track.

Renegade

The best coaster at Valleyfair? Sure. Why not? Opened in 2007, Renegade has since allowed Valleyfair to just barely edge out Michigan’s Adventure for the title of the longest a Cedar Fair park has gone without adding a major coaster. Of course, Renegade isn’t some relocated production model, but a high-quality custom-designed Great Coasters International wooden coaster built right around the time the company was nearing its peak.

The quasi out-and-back and twister layout amply highlights GCI’s strengths in sudden pops of airtime married with quick direction changes, all with a sense of sustained speed which is less common for their layouts. The S-curving drop is… interesting? I’m not sure I’d prefer it over either a sharp, straight drop or a heavily-banked, twisting drop, but I’m glad to have at least given it a try once. Unlike Wild Thing, the low speed hill that follows the main drop delivers on its promise. If the ride didn’t lose as much steam towards the end, nor suffer from a problematic GCI rattle the whole way through (no doubt with help from the harsh Minnesota winters), Renegade would probably rate even higher on my list of favorite GCI coasters than its already-respectable fourth or fifth place position would suggest.

Excalibur

If I’m being honest, this was the ride that most motivated me to finally book a flight to MSP. Not just because it’s a rare example of an Arrow mine train style coaster but designed to act like a major thrill coaster. But because, with its lonely placement at an isolated cul-de-sac with prime waterpark adjacency, hard-to-define-other-than-rough nature, and presumably low ridership due to the previous two conditions, it was the Arrow coaster I most expected to be in danger of suddenly closing at the end of some not-to-distant future season. With a couple years of retrospect, that hasn’t turned out to be the case, yet, and I’m glad. Yes, Excalibur is short and rough, but it’s a concentrated dose of all those endearing Arrow eccentricities shot right into my veins. I’m not sure who at Arrow’s offices thought they could master a high-speed twister layout with their advanced coathanger technique, but bless their heart for trying. I rode it a dozen times.

Thunder Canyon

I didn’t ride it, but I did have to comment on the spectacular amount of water it dumps directly over riders’ heads. Absolutely owned.

Steel Venom

The coaster at Valleyfair I most irrationally dislike. As the park’s one large steel coaster built this century, as well as their only major coaster from a European manufacturer, couldn’t they have ordered something better? In the right place, Intamin impulse coasters are perfectly fine and good, but Valleyfair was not the right place… especially not way out at the end of an unnecessary new cul-de-sac in the middle of what was once their parking lot. Everything I wrote about other impulse coasters applies here, just with much worse scenery. I honored this coaster by riding it the same number of laps as I was willing to give Corkscrew.

Route 76

The park’s newest “themed” zone, Route 76 tries to make lemonade out of the lemon that was Steel Venom’s awkward parking lot placement by building a whole supporting land around it. The result is certainly a step in the right direction, anchored by the (NOT A COASTER) Northern Lights skateboard Disc’O coaster by Zamperla, with rides like the Antique Autos and Larson Flying Eagles playing supporting roles. The land is a picture perfect snapshot of all of Cedar Fair’s favorite low-budget things circa mid-2010’s. There’s a loose “nostalgic road trip” theme here (“76” being a reference to the park’s opening date), although visually it’s not much different from the rest of the park, just flatter and newer. Valleyfair has focused most of their new additions since my visit in this area, so maybe one day there will finally be some there there.

Thrill Rides

A pair of S&S attractions, seemingly built out of the belief that if it works in Sandusky, it will do gangbusters in Shakopee, never minding the vastly different capacity requirements of each park. Nevertheless, both give Valleyfair some muscle to its non-coaster thrill ride collection. Power Tower is short an upward shot tower compared to its Ohio brethren, but is also located on a miniature island near the center of the park, which is honestly the most adorable and memorable thing about it. Xtreme Swing, by contrast, is more unique, being one of only two of the super-sized 40-passenger Screamin’ Swings ever sold by S&S, also opening in 2006. Subtract a point for the more generic name, but otherwise it’s much the same as Cedar Point’s model, with epic, partially upside down hangtime at the top of each swing arc, albeit limited to no more than four instances per cycle. The park was also home to the Intamin Looping Starship until the end of the 2019 season. Sad, as these were always a fun and increasingly rare novelty.

Dinosaurs Alive!

Another casualty at the end of the 2019 season was this walk-through dinosaur exhibition. This was an odd experiment in economic liberalization, in which the normally conservative Cedar Fair decided to have an outside vendor, Dinosaurs Uncovered, produce and even sell tickets for an independent attraction inside the park. The result was… odd. The slow-paced static educational exhibits were all the wrong speed and style for an unthemed amusement park, which showed in the fact that I had the trail virtually to myself. It’s basically a Midwestern nature walk with oversized dinosaur toys scattered about, many of them (rather conveniently for their makers) juveniles or half submerged in mud. The scientific accuracy was relatively good compared to most theme park competition, and someone clearly loved researching for this project, as they wrote a small novella for the text panels next to each dino. Good to get away from the noise and the crowds for a half hour.

Conclusion

I planned to finish the evening riding Excalibur and Renegade as much as I could, although the swarms of mayflies coming in from the nearby Minnesota River put an end to that plan. Wild Thing, being higher and further from the river, proved to be a better finale. Despite being a relatively small park, they stay open until 10 or 11pm most nights in the summer, giving plenty of time to get the most out of what the park had to offer.

Despite having grown up not too far away (as the crow flies) in northwestern Michigan, it wasn’t until I moved out to California and could plan connecting flights in Minneapolis between my hometown and LA that a visit to the twin cities finally proved feasible. The park is far from the top of the chain’s offerings, but at least four of the coasters (a majority) rate “quite good” or higher, and there’s a few decent flat rides as well. Mix it in with some “Minnesota nice” charm, and the park comes out a simple but good flavor that doesn’t need to be overcomplicated. (Not that a new coaster would be at all complicated.)