Thunder Mountain

I'm sure some of you thought I forgot about Thunder Mountain.

 

No I didn't.

 

For some reason this was always included in Fantasyland for me. I know it's NOT part of Fantasyland, but there you have it.

 

This ride was kind of like a starter coaster for me, for some reason I was never scared of this one. Maybe it was because you couldn't really see the whole ride, or maybe it was the cheery train sounds, or maybe by this point I was just so tired of fighting it that I just shut my mouth and got on. Whatever the reason Big Thunder Mountain Railroad was always easy to get me on. My only concern was during the safety spiel, when a man would drawl in a prospector voice to hold on to your hats and glasses. Why this was a major concern was that I was always afraid that my glasses would fly off and I would get in trouble.

 

Having lived in Utah, the landscape portrayed on this ride wasn't really anything new to me, not to mention that I would be in the back seat of a car with my sister for ten hours driving through the desert to my Grandparent's house just before the Disneyland trip. I've grown to appreciate the beauty of the wide open space a bit more now, but there was nothing worse than seeing nothing out the window for hours and hours as a kid.

 

A Glimpse Behind the Magic

Thunder Mountain was actually constructed over what used to be a much more calm ride through the same kinds of vistas. Some of the elements from this leisurely ride still exist;

 

1) On the first lift, if you look to the left there are pools of water that have colored ripples on the surface, once part of Rainbow Caverns

 

2) Obviously a lot of the rock formations were just reused.

 

3) Many of the animals are still used, as a matter of fact, in some of the small lakes around this ride you can still catch a glimpse of the fish that jump out of the water.

 

The story for this ride was always lost on me, I never really got it. Apparently the idea was that a small mining town grew overnight after the discovery of gold, but it has become a ghost town after an earthquake and you the guest are boarding an old mining train which is now running on it's own. It seems like such a chipper ride, the back story doesn't seem to have much of an impact on the atmosphere. I think that maybe to get the nostalgia of it you might have had to know about the area before Thunder Mountain was built.

 

Lesson Learned;

You don't have to know EVERYTHING about what you are doing to just sit back and enjoy it.