DCA's Grizzly Peak Recreation Area, Interviews 2

DCA's Grizzly Peak Recreation Area
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LP: Moving away from Grizzly, Disneyland has Tom Sawyer Island a vast kids’ play area. Was it important to have something like that here as well?

CR: We thought it was real important to have that kind of activity in this park too. All of Grizzly Peak at one time had that type of flavor until we put the raft ride into it and that worked out very well. But the play area was - again, we were looking for a combination, something that would be a great place for the whole family because we know at the different parks that works great. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids studio tour in Florida. DinoLand at Animal Kingdom and Tom Sawyer’s Island of course at Disneyland where it’s not just the kids but the parents get to go along too and do these things. So we said we really want to create a great play area and we want to theme it to California and we came up with the theme of the national and state parks and put them together. We did a lot of research at different parks and found elements that we really loved, like the net climbs are one thing and the bouncing log that you go through and the slides that work. Little bit of rock climbing area, the cable slides were a big thing, we really enjoyed that. And we said, okay, how can we put all these together into this story. That was at the heart of it. We got these elements. Here is what we want it to look like. How can we lay this out in layers and in the space we’ve got which is tight. We always have to be very efficient about the way we use space. This is what we came up with. This kind of over and under and around and through, up one bridge, down the other, down the slide, over and up the other tower and it’s gone over real well. I’m real pleased with it. My family enjoyed it very much too.

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This picture shows the proximity of the Challenge Trail to the Grand Californian Hotel
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LP: Does this area have any room for expansion or is it pretty well filled out?

CR: There is a little bit of room, but not much to work with. I’m sure that we may find some room for some little additions and enhancements along the way but the hotel is pretty close and Soaring is right next door too.

LP: Other than the Grizzly Peak area what would you say is your favorite attraction in the park?

CR: I love the roller coaster. I think this is a wonderful roller coaster. It’s got great character. There’s roller coasters that have these superlatives like tallest, fastest, scariest, whatever, but this one is just fun. I really enjoy the music. I enjoy the pace of it, the various features, the camel backs, the loop is wonderful. It really makes you feel like you’re swooping upside down. Some loops seem like they happen so fast that you hardly know you went upside down. This one you really feel it. I took my sons and my dad on it. We all came off and said we got to go do it again. It’s terrific. I’d say that’s a highlight.

Mark Sumner

LaughingPlace.com: What were your contributions to this park?

Mark Sumner: I’m the technical director of ride engineering and I was involved with the Soarin' attraction and Grizzly River Run, as far as the ride systems.

LP: Can you tell me what is unique about Grizzly Run as opposed to traditional or any other raft ride?

MS: There are actually two things I would say are different, maybe three things as far as a white water rafting ride. We bill this as the tallest, the longest and the fastest, which it is. It’s unique that we have down ramps. The only other one like it is in our Disney park in Florida and in fact some of that technology was developed at the same time. We actually built a full scale down ramp in our facilities up in Tujunga and tested for about five months how a river raft acts on a down ramp because no one had done that before. We didn’t know whether it was hard to slow down, whether it would hydroplane. With something like Splash Mountain we have the ability to reconfigure the holes to help contain some of the splashing, help it slow down. We didn’t have that opportunity with the round river tube. So the down ramps are unique to it.

The other thing that is unique is usually when we design a water ride what we like to do is put them on the edge of the park. That’s because we have big noisy pumps. We like to have a reservoir that usually is out of sight. We didn’t have that luxury here because the bear ride is right in the middle of the park. So we made our pumps totally submersible so they’re about 12 to 15 feet under water right in the middle of the park where they don’t make so much noise. The other problem we had was where to put a reservoir. There wasn’t lots of space available. We looked over to Paradise Pier and saw a big lagoon that was very tantalizing so what we ended up doing is taking a portion of the that. There is actually a wall underneath the Paradise Pier bridge and one-half of that Pacific Wharf is actually the reservoir for the raft ride. The only problem is it is 300-feet away from the raft ride. So we ended up building an underground water tunnel that people won’t see that’s about 14 feet wide and 8 feet tall, you can drive a couple of pickup trucks through it. And the challenge for our creative folks then was when we start the raft ride up and start filling up the mountain with water, the water in the reservoir drops about 2-1/2 feet. So they were scratching their heads and said what do we do. Then they had the idea to treat it like a tidal basin. There’s a bunch of rocks in there, it looks like a tidal basin and what happens in the morning is the tide goes out as we turn the ride on and then in the evening, when we turn the ride off, the tide comes back in. So if you’re ever out there having lunch and the tide is coming in you’ll know there’s a problem and the raft ride is shut down.

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Where Grizzly water goes for the night.
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LP: This was one of the first times a raft goes down a drop. Can you talk about that?

MS: It was a little bit surprising simply because we didn’t know how they would act and what we found out is they actually slow down probably a lot faster than say a log ride like Splash Mountain. We spent a lot of time developing what the water depth should be and what the profiles for the rail should be, so we learned a lot. Funny story - we did this for this ride and the team that was developing the one in Animal Kingdom had decided they were going to do that and when they saw what we were learning they ended up taking over our test facility and doing testing and making some changes to their ride. Doing the early testing made a big difference and when they put their ride in it worked right off the bat and the same thing here. We made very, very minor changes in doing the test and adjust on them because of all the knowledge that we gained a year and a half ago was very beneficial.

LP: Was the spin a challenge?

MS: It was. There’s a good story behind that too. Originally our idea was to do a spiral down ramp and we were thinking about doing a 360 degree spiral. When we built our test facility what we found out is that it just had more friction than we expected and that we couldn’t get - with the height that we had available - we couldn’t get 360 degrees, we only could do about 180. Everybody kind of said "that doesn’t seem very fun, what else can we do?" So when we had this test facility, we thought "I wonder what it would feel like to spin going down a straight down ramp?" So in the early test I’d stand up there and hold the edge of the raft and we would cut the rope that would let it go and we would give it a little spin. People said "hey, that’s really a lot of fun. How can we appropriate that?" So we spent some more time on this test facility and figured out on how to make the ramp spin going down. It’s a subtle thing but it makes a big difference. It catches people by surprise. They’re not expecting it.