Welcome to Extinct Attractions. Today, we are going to take a look at a few attractions from the earliest days of Disneyland that served as the best way to get to know Frontierland.
This past week, restaurants reopened at Downtown Disney at the Disneyland Resort, with Buena Vista Street’s coming soon. Cases have been more than halved in the last two weeks in California, and with vaccine distribution going better and better every day, it seems like there is a good chance that guests will be able to visit Disneyland again by this summer. We are all looking forward to that day, but for now, it’s time to jump back to 1955 and recall Disneyland’s opening day.
Via OC Register
When Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955, Frontierland was a mere shell of what we know today. The only opening day attraction that is still in the park today was the Mark Twain Riverboat, with Tom Sawyer Island and the Frontierland Shootin’ Exposition still a little ways away. Big Thunder Mountain Railroad was still not even close to a twinkle in Tony Baxter’s eye as the land was originally occupied by the Living Desert.
When the park opened, guests had a couple of ways to get around the Living Desert, either by mule on the Mule Pack or by riding around in a stagecoach. With those methods not quite enough, the Conestoga Wagons were also added in August, to give guests a triad of transportation methods to explore the Old West that Disney had created.
Via Kolby Konnection
The one issue with The Living Desert was that it wasn’t very alive. The land was basically just hills of dirt piled up with not many things for guests to look at so in 1956, the town of Rainbow Ridge opened up at the entrance to the attraction with some exteriors of buildings created to help the guests feel like they were leaving a town and truly travelling to a wild frontier. To mark the change, the mule pack changed their moniker and became the Rainbow Ridge Pack Mules starting in June 1956.
Additionally, they added the Rainbow Caverns Mine Train that took guests on a trip through the newly-added Rainbow Caverns. Guests now had four options to tour the desert area of Frontierland and all of its glory.
Over the next few years, the area remained much the same but after the success of the major Tomorrowland expansion of 1959, Disneyland execs moved to reinvigorate Frontierland, too. To do so, they closed down the Stagecoach and Conestoga Wagons on September 13, 1959 to focus more so on the other two attractions: the newly rechristened Mine Train Through Nature's Wonderland and the Pack Mules Through Nature’s Wonderland.
Now the only change wasn’t the name as Disney went all out to make the attractions a desirable destination adding geysers, animatronic animals and Cascade Peak to tower over the land. In fact, Disney put so much money into the attractions that they both became E tickets. Like I get the mine train being updated to that level, but the pack mules, too? I can only imagine grumbling parents passing over their E tickets, because their kids wanted to ride the mules (though everyone could that wanted to).
As a whole, even though these attractions sounded pretty normal, I wish that I had had a chance to experience them. If you know me, you know that I love the PeopleMover more than nearly any other attraction in the Disney pantheon, so what I thought was so fun about these attractions was that they were basically PeopleMovers for Frontierland. Sure, they loaded much slower and had nowhere near the capacity of the Tomorrowland classic, but the general idea was the same: a slow, moving attraction around nearly an entire land that helped guests truly take in the whole experience.
The wagons and stagecoaches seemed interesting, but the one attraction I really wish I had a chance to experience was the Mule Pack. The fact that you could travel around on an animal in Disneyland is simply wild to me. You would never see something like that today because of the risks it could cause to both human and animal, so the fact that it existed for over twenty years is fascinating to me.
Via Timeout
Eventually, it was time for the Mule Packs to join its fellow Frontierland transportation methods in retirement with the Mule Packs closing in February of 1973. Though it would be another seven years before its replacement, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, would open, the unruliness of the mules probably led to the attraction’s demise as much as anything else. Even though they were well-rested and had short shifts, the animals proved to be a wild bunch who would randomly start and stop making each experience truly unique. In a way, it was like an early iteration of Smuggler’s Run with endless different experiences depending on the smallest things, and that is what truly makes it an experience I’m sad that I never got to try.
Via Juicy Quotes
As always, don’t forget to check out my interactive maps of the Disney Parks throughout the years where you can watch or learn more about all the attractions from the domestic parks, with Japan newly added.
Thanks for reading and have a magical day!