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Author The Dells TR (Mt. Olympus & Timber Falls)
Animan1
Posts: 5394
Registered: 5/14/2003

Rank: Platinum Critic
6/8/2009 8:15:43 PM
On June 2nd and 3rd, I made a quick overnight trip to the Wisconsin Dells to visit Mt. Olympus and Timber Falls. I had been meaning to visit the area for several years, and my goal was to position the trip early enough in the year so as to beat the summer crowds. In hindsight, I think it was actually a good thing that this trip was delayed a few years, since I had now visited Holiday World and had experienced a park that I felt would be a good match for Mt. Olympus style-wise.
The 2nd (a Tuesday) dawned cloudy and rainy, and the forecast was for it to remain that day throughout the day, both at home and in The Dells. I left shortly after 6 a.m., and make the drive in just about 3 ½ hours, making good time and running into little traffic or construction, which make it enjoyable. It also rained relatively little, although it remained cloudy, windy, and very cool (mid-50s) for early June.
I arrived at the park just before it opened at 10, and found the parking lot to be generally deserted, save for some buses of kids on school field trips. This trend would continue the second day as well, despite significantly better weather…in this sense, the trip was already a success, in that it was not especially busy, save for the groups, and I rarely had long waits on anything (the longest I waited for anything the whole trip was probably 30 minutes).
I won’t detail my experience on the rides, as my reviews mostly do that already, but suffice it to say that the park has a very good wooden collection (Opa! is only really entertaining as a novelty; this park is well-known, and rightfully so, for its woodies). Cyclops took the prize as my favorite coaster, but Hades, Zeus, and even Pegasus are all above-average in my opinion and fit together very well (both figuratively and literally, as all 3 larger coasters intertwine nicely in the front of the park). The go-karts are also very enjoyable, although I wish that they were a little faster (I have little experience with go-karts, so it may be that these tracks are already faster than is typical, but it seemed like a little more speed would have really made them a blast). As it was, Poseidon was probably my favorite track, but The Trojan Horse and Titan’s Tower were also very enjoyable (Herme’s Turbo Track was the only one that I found to be boring). Simply from a ride standpoint, I can’t give Mt. Olympus the edge over Holiday World, but it is closer than I would have guessed before my trip…both feature some great, intense, and unique wooden coasters, and well-landscaped parks that interact with the environment well.
Unfortunately for Mt. Olympus, however, there is more to a park experience than simply the rides. And in these other categories, Mt. Olympus was below-average in most respects. The prices were fair, and I got free admission the second day for staying at the Best Western (other hotels may offer the same free wristbands, I don’t know if they do or not). However, the employee staff and clientele left a lot to be desired. I understand that there is relatively little that a park can do about the kind of people that attend, and that the majority of the other people at the park when I visited were rowdy school groups with little consideration for other guests, but I was still disappointed by the actions (or lack thereof) taken by employees to control these kids (granted, it should really be the chaperones that do that, but they were generally pretty useless, when present, too). There was a lot of running and climbing by these young rascals at the park, and I lost count of the number of times that I was elbowed out of the way and nearly pushed down the stairs by stampeding hooligans upon exiting a ride. The employees did little to prevent or even discourage such behavior, but that may be partly due to the fact that the employees at the park, and especially the ride ops, said virtually nothing the entire time that I was there. Most of the ride ops were the same on both days, and they rotated around to the various attractions, with the guys usually running the go-karts and the girls running the coasters. Most of the girls/women seemed to be Eastern European, so a language barrier might have played some part in their silence, but I was, and still am, shocked by just how quiet they were. Indeed, most of the employees, male or female, seemed to prefer to use hand signals than to communicate verbally. The employees (actually, the operators; the shopkeepers and ticket staff were quite friendly) were also severely lacking in motivation, frequently moving almost unbearably slowly and appearing as though they would rather do anything else other than their current task. On the coasters, the ops also had the annoying habit of waiting for additional riders to come up the path if the train was not mostly full. I understand their intention is probably to improve capacity, especially since all their coasters only ran 1 train when I was there, something that I doubt changes in the summer, it was very annoying to wait for up to several minutes for additional riders to get to the entrance, walk to the station, and board when I could have ridden and been back in the station by the time they were ready to board.
As mentioned earlier, I also stopped by Timber Falls to ride Avalanche/Hell Cat (the signs at the park still say Avalanche). Again, I save the ride details for the review, but the park was nearly deserted and on 3 of my 4 rides, I was the only one on the train. Indeed, the first time I went up to the loading platform, I arrived to find the station completely empty, without even a ride op. It was quite something to be at a “park” so completely empty.
All in all, I had a fun trip, despite some of the annoyances that I experienced at Mt. Olympus. Over the 2 days, I got in 34 rides on 6 new coasters, with 13 coming on Cyclops (10 rides in the phenomenal back row!). Mt. Olympus won’t overtake Holiday World as my favorite “small” park in the foreseeable future, but the rides are still the main reason that I practice this hobby, and in that way, I was not disappointed. Overall trip rating: 8/10. Thanks for reading!

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"..Impossibility is a word only to be found in the dictionary of fools."..

- Napoleon Bonaparte

Coaster Count: 120
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