Hulk's Trip Report
Lagoon - 8/24/21
Following in the illustrious footsteps of
@MickeyWaffleCo. , last Tuesday I chose to pay a visit to Lagoon Amusement Park in Farmington, Utah. (Who among us will be next?) My mood lately has very much been leaning towards the simpler pleasures of rollers coasters & carnivals & amusement parks, which was an itch which Lagoon was extremely well-equipped to scratch. I found the park to be utterly charming, no-frills, and just a joy to visit.
Lagoon was founded in 1886, making it the oldest operating park west of the Mississippi. Lagoon dates back to the era of the classic trolley park, to the time when amusement entertainment as we know it was just getting started. There is such a heavy feeling of history and atmosphere, all very much in-line with some similar vintage parks in places like Pennsylvania. Overall, Lagoon struck me as an upscale Knoebels. Like a permanent carnival with some added class and lovely landscaping. Lagoon is truly independent, not a soulless chain park, having been family-operated for generations. This means there are little idiosyncrasies to the park's operations, things they do just a little differently, which make a visit something special even for a seasoned park enthusiast.
My Tuesday visit was timed to hopefully avoid the queue spillover crowds for which Lagoon is infamous. (As the only major park for hundreds of miles, and with the local Salt Lake City market, Lagoon can get packed on weekends and summers.) I was fortunate to experience hardly any crowds to speak of. Even the locals I chatted with said they rarely see it this empty. The SLC school year began yesterday, so there was a final hurrah from a few schoolchildren, but it was otherwise quiet. The longest wait of the day was perhaps 10 minutes long, meaning I got to experience the park's many headliners 5 times or more each, to the point where I wore my body out after a while.
Conversely, the weather wasn't really on my side. A fine haze of wildfire smoke permeated the entire SLC region that entire day (plus all the skies from L.A. to Utah on my flight out), with unhealthy air quality. Happily, thunderstorms rolled in towards the evening to clear out the pollution, but that's getting ahead of myself...
My Hampton Inn room was within walking distance, by way of a cow pasture. My bedroom included a view of Lagoon's headlining coaster Cannibal, which I watched with delight the night before my park visit. Despite the haze, Lagoon's setting is lovely, perched against a mountain backdrop and built around what has become an old growth grove of elms. There are cute landscaping touches throughout the park, from unique little fountains to distinctive planters, granting Lagoon a degree of detail and explorability you just don't often find in the bigger, more common Six Flags or Cedar Fair parks. Granted, Lagoon doesn't do theming in the Disney style, not that you judge such a place with that sort of unfair comparison. Individual attractions carry their own themes (stronger theming on newer rides), but there's no overarching concept beyond simply being pleasant. The overall park is laid out in an organic grid pattern, with newer additions ringing out from the historic center, with elements of organization like a dedicated family area and a roller coaster cluster.
Despite the low crowds, I roughly followed my high-crowd touring battleplan, beginning with the lowest-capacity rides. That meant rope-dropping Terroride, a spooky vintage-style dark ride. Later in the day I did the fairly similar Dracula's Castle dark ride. Both are like permanent versions of traveling carnival spook houses, each with more square footage and budget, but still realized in an old school way. Cheap pop-up scares, rickety bus bar vehicles, décor straight out of a regional Halloween costume store. Combined, these rides give Knoebels' Haunted Mansion a run for its money. These aren't Disney-level dark rides, by no means, but taken as they are (charming throwbacks), they are fun.
The family roller coasters were my next goal, but since they weren't open yet I continued to my next target: a wooden roller coaster known simply as Roller Coaster. This John A. Miller classic, the 7th oldest operating coaster worldwide, is celebrating its centennial in 2021! With constant upkeep over the past century (it's a true Ship of Theseus), Roller Coaster rides nearly as well as any brand new woodie. There is, naturally, a bit of the rough jitteriness which comes with all wooden coasters, though it's that good sort of roughness which makes woodies feel like comfort food. The delightfully basic double-out-and-back layout, with its flat turnarounds and hefty scaffolding structure, continues to impress with great unexpected moments of airtime and a generous ride duration.
I then proceeded to Lagoon's southern corner, where a majority of their big coasters dwell. Lagoon is practically a roller coaster museum, boasting a wide assortment of traveling carnival thrillers given permanent homes. (An effective budget-friendly way to develop a park.) Taking rides as they presented themselves, my next stop was Wild Mouse. Wild mouse coasters tend to be one-and-done for me, and Lagoon's was no exception. It offered stronger laterals on the hairpin turns - a good thing. The mid course brakes were so strong, the lap bar repeatedly stabbed my gut - a bad thing.
Spider is a spinning roller coaster on a small square plot. It is impressively lengthy given the limited acreage. Like Wild Mouse, Spider seemed like a slightly wilder version of a standard ride type. The maintenance and operations throughout were top notch. I found this a middling ride, so it was a one-and-done for me.
With Wicked not yet open, next I tried out Colossus, a vintage 1970s Schwarzkopf model which started its life on the German traveling fair circuit. I find old Schwarzkopfs to be hit-or-miss, likely due to repair work as these rides start to age. Colossus proved to be, by a wide margin, my absolute favorite Schwarzkopf! Surprisingly smooth, intense but not overwhelming. The ride begins, after a turnaround drop, with two back-to-back vertical loops - uniquely, these are perfect circles rather than the more common ellipses, meaning a more comfortable, consistent G-force throughout the loop. Two helixes complete the ride, intertwining the loops, with each helix offering some unexpected sideways profiling to make them more interesting than their typically lackluster modern counterparts.
Still awaiting Wicked's opening, I crossed the park via Sky Ride, a chairlift tramway riding over the central midway and intertwining with the mature tree growth. Sky Ride is a wonderfully relaxing, scenic transportation option. I rode it five times, whenever I needed a rest and wanted to get from Cannibal to Colossus. (Sadly, on the weekend before my visit, Sky Ride saw a fatal accident when a rider intentionally climbed from his seat and fell onto the midway. My sympathies to his survivors.)
This brings us to Lagoon's northern end, to Cannibal. This is what put Lagoon on the map! Built in-house by the park's engineers, without any outside coaster manufacturer input, Cannibal is a world-class modern steel terror. It boasts the world's third-steepest drop, at 116 degrees, and notably this is the only beyond-vertical drop that's over 200' tall. With its massive elevator lift structure and its many inversions dwarfing everything else in the park, Cannibal is certainly intimidating. Nearly everyone else in line was a park regular, so they'd long ago gotten past their fears of this beast, though I listened to elementary age children describe how scary they first found Cannibal many years ago.
This was my 195th roller coaster (I now stand at 199, with plans to make Velocicoaster my 200th), so coaster heights no longer intimidate me. Rather, I was stoked to experience Cannibal's many one-of-a-kind elements. Think of it as a Gerstlauer knockoff, like an oversized Eurofighter. That initial drop flings riders head-over-heels out of their seats, with extended hangtime and only the clamshell lap bar to hold you in. (Extended hangtime is Cannibal's main purpose.) A sort of wild stretched-out Immelmann inversion follows, and after that a few more similarly powerful inversions. The mid course brake run slows trains down, which is usually unwanted, however Cannibal makes that deceleration a plus. Trains take the infamous "Lagoon roll" at super slow speeds, glacially going 95% through a clockwise heartline roll (all mere feet above a rockwork pond), then resolving into a counterclockwise roll. This is an extremely disorienting moment, the ride's (and park's) highlight, and the most pronounced bit of coaster hangtime I've experienced. Cannibal concludes with a shockingly forceful 4.5 G helix, which sometimes made me grey out.
After a Cannibal re-ride (the line got shorter), I went to do the family coasters which had finally opened up. The Bat is a Vekoma suspended coaster, one of their older "hang 'n' bang" models that's so hated by coaster enthusiasts due to their roughness and head-throttling over-the-shoulder restraints. It was my least favorite ride of the day. Worse still, with slow loading and only a single train, Bat's line flowed like molasses.
In contrast, BomBora was a joy! This was Lagoon's first in-house coaster, a proof-of-concept for Cannibal. It's built in the style of a Vekoma Junior Skater like Flight of the Hippogriff or Gadget's Go-Coaster, but with a few more interesting elements like a trick track or an upwards helix. Oh, and onboard speakers! My ride featured a Beach Boys medley to suit the ride's surf theme; not sure if they offer other tunes as well. While BomBora remains by its very nature a lesser coaster, it's now my favorite among its specific genre.
Puff the Little Fire Dragon is a kiddie coaster, something which adults are
technically allowed to ride, but they really shouldn't. It's meant exclusively for preschoolers. I rode it to boost my numbers, then moved on, embarrassed.
By now, Wicked was running! This is a one-off Zierer model, featuring single-car trains like a smaller Cannibal. Wicked boasts the world's only vertical launch, which sends you straight up at 90 degrees before a quick top hat hill sends you straight down again at 90 degrees. This crazy moment must be experienced firsthand! Some good stuff immediately follows, like a speed hill with a jolt of airtime, a forceful Immelmann turn, and a zero-g roll with pronounced hangtime. Following this is a mid course brake run, and sadly Wicked's second half afterwards never comes close to that insane first section. What Wicked does well is fantastic (it's one of the rides I did several times), but since it feels incomplete I'd have to rank it behind Cannibal, Colossus and Roller Coaster.
Now, I began touring at 10 AM. It's now right around noon only, and I've already conquered all of Lagoon's coasters. (Save for Jet Star II, a vintage bobsled model not unlike Magic Kingdom's Space Mountain, which doesn't allow single riders for safety reasons.) Moving slightly ahead of the crowd wave, I pause for a quick lunch. Lagoon's food offerings are mostly carnival snacks; my dinner later was a very carnivalesque corndog & lemonade & cotton candy. But for lunch, I tried out their newish Biergarten sit down eatery, had a pastrami burger. The meal was nothing special, but by soaring to the level of "acceptable" it easily surpassed anything I've ever had in a Six Flags.
Post-lunch is no time for roller coasters. Rather I rode Rattlesnake Rapids, a rather typical (but still oh-so-refreshing) rapids ride. I remained just ahead of the crowd wave, as the queue length tripled while I was on-ride.
This rapids ride is hidden away in Lagoon's secret Pioneer Village area. This quiet section, which otherwise features zero rides, is a historical recreation of pioneer-era Utah from around the time of Lagoon's founding, with many genuine period structures. When the park is more crowded, I'm told, the area hosts live Old West performances which sound similar to the Ghost Town Live events at Knott's Berry Farm. As I found it, Pioneer Village was simply an area to decompress and rest for a spell in between wilder activities.
The day's remainder is largely a blur, as I spent my time re-riding favorite coasters and occasionally pausing to do a classic flat ride. (Wave swinger, pirate ship, carousel.) At one point, mostly to get off my feet for an extended period of time, I rode the narrow gauge locomotive through Utah's 2nd largest zoo (!). There were kangaroos.
The air quality slowly improved throughout the day, with an approaching thunderstorm cleaning out the wildfire smoke. The skies became extremely overcast around 5, and suddenly it was so grey that the midway neon was already visible. With large raindrops threatening ride closures (and me already running on fumes), I rushed to get in a few more rides while I could. Roller Coaster stayed open the longest, since lightning storms prefer attacking steel coasters, so that was my final ride of the day. I re-rode this classic 100-year-old woodie in pounding heavy summer rain, with multiple lightning strikes on the prairie horizon visible from the turnaround. That was a spectacular finale to a wonderful, exhausting day!
So, who here's going to Lagoon next week?
