Mt. Olympus, Wisconsin Dells

Visited: August 8, 2018

Attending: Just Brian

This park is right in the Wisconsin Dells, near to where my conference was taking place. It’s kind of low-rent as parks go, but it has one world-class coaster that I wanted to experience. I finished up work at 5:00 on the last day of the conference, and the park closes at 7:00, so I figured there was just enough time for me to get in some credits. I drove over there and spent way too much time driving around trying to find the parking lot entrance. Once I did, I saw plenty of signs saying that parking was $20, but nobody was staffing the booths and cars were just driving in, so I did too. When I got to the ticket booth, I mentioned that I knew it was late, but I wanted to ride anyway, and the attendant replied that a woman had been by earlier with a pass she couldn’t use, and apparently left it for some random customer...who turned out to be me. So while I only spent 90 minutes at the park, I didn’t pay anything for it. Can’t argue with that kind of efficiency.

Mt. Olympus (never “Mount,” and most commonly called “MTO” for some reason) leans really hard into its ancient Greek theme. There’s lots of columns everywhere, and all the rides are named for characters from Greek myths.

Hades 360

Hades was the reason I came to the park in the first place. I saw it on a few “best wooden” lists, but I had to look it up when I first heard of it, because I’d never heard of the park it’s in. It’s mostly well-known because of its two gimmicks: It dives from the first drop immediately into a very long tunnel that goes under the parking lot, emerging on the other side. It then does a corkscrew inversion, very unusual for a wooden coaster that’s not from RMC, and then dives back into the tunnel all the way back into the park.

I’m getting jaded now, so the ride’s 160-foot height didn’t bother me much. But I didn’t expect the tunnel to be completely pitch black. The POV video I linked to here has the lights on in the tunnel for filming, but it never occurred to me that’s not how it normally runs. The clue is right there in the name, but I didn’t think of it. Between the surprise of the tunnel and a reason I’ll detail in a second, I almost didn’t notice the inversion. I was nervous about an inversion with only a lap bar, but the Gravity Group trains have big chunky lap bars, and it wasn’t really a problem.

The operations on this ride were simply terrible, and although it was a physically short line, they were only running one train, so I waited about 45 minutes to ride. Behind me were a couple of older teenagers with their younger brother. The teenagers were being very shouty and sweary, but the younger kid never said anything. I could hear him breathing, though, because he was so anxious. Once the teens discovered I was a single rider, they asked if I’d ride with the kid, which wasn’t very fair of them, but I agreed. So I took a middle row instead of the back where I’d been planning to ride, and spent most of my time trying to reassure the kid. Either it worked, or he’d been shamming the whole time, because when we started down the drop, he threw his hands up and never put them down. I was pretty surprised.

Zeus

After Hades, the other three coasters in the park, all wooden, were walk-ons for me, none of which were particularly worthy of comment. Zeus is the next biggest, at 90 feet, but didn’t impress me much. I sat in the last car, and it was rather rough and rattley.

Cyclops

Cyclops is even smaller than Zeus, but slightly surprising in that the second drop is larger than the first, and goes off the side of a hill into a ditch. Still not anything particularly exciting.

Pegasus

Pegasus is the smallest of the four, and I rode it last, only because it’s a bit separated from the others. Definitely nothing to write home about, but very rough from the back car. You’d think I’d learn, but apparently not. I was ready to leave after picking up those credits.