Originally Posted By Doobie This topic is for discussion of the May 10th article on Grizzly Peak Recreation Area. This article is at: <a href="News-ID502500.asp" target="_blank">http://LaughingPlace.com/News-ID502500.asp</a>.
Originally Posted By Fathom7 I'm still confused? I know Kali River in AK is the shortest raft ride in any park in the world. So Grizzly is the longest? Why such a big difference? Is Grizzly really longer than Popeye in IOA? If anyone knows the true answer by riding both Grizzly & Popeye let us know. Does anyone here think its weird that Disney brags about having the tallest,biggest,longest,etc raft ride. I mean they always shy away from that kind-of talk when it comes to their coasters. I wish they would get that mind set on their coasters and add the detail themeing they are famous for. Oh well.
Originally Posted By magic19 The Grizzly Peak Recreation Area is one of DCA's best accomplishments. A great raft ride, a fun area for kids to play--lots of Disney detail everywhere. The designers are to be commended for a job well done.
Originally Posted By dcvc I agree magic19, I continue to be amazed at how well a job Disney did with this part of the park. The detail is incredible, the way the area blends with the hotel is fantastic, and there are touches everywhere that truly make me feel that, at least for a moment, I'm really up in the High Sierra's. Score big points for Disney on this one.
Originally Posted By ni_teach While the Grizzly Peak area is wonderful, I do have disagree with several design points. First it's in the wrong place inside the park. It to close to the entrance which makes it a real pain to walk around. I think that it should have moved straight back, toward the convention center, and turned 180 degrees. Second, I was a tremendous waste of space not to put something inside the mountain, a theater or something. The river ride takes up such a small volume of space when compared to the whole mountain.
Originally Posted By gadzuux I've read on these boards that there are pump stations, filtration systems and the like inside the mountain; not only for the raft ride but for the lagoon as well.
Originally Posted By ni_teach "Pump stations, filtration systems:" Yes, those things are there, but they only take up a small fraction of the mountain.
Originally Posted By jonvn The mountain is mostly filled in with dirt. We discussed this a few months ago. It's not hollow.
Originally Posted By ni_teach Jonvn - I know that it's not hollow. I'm just saying that something could have been built into that area. It didn't have to be just dirt.
Originally Posted By jonvn Oh, I see. Actually, I don't know why it is filled with dirt myself. I thought it WOULD be hollow. Why put all that dirt there (which costs money, you know) unless it was needed for some reason? Maybe it's there for structural integrity, but I don't think that sounds right. I think if it weren't hollow, the CBJ figures would be good for it. That's what we were talking about before.
Originally Posted By Briguy1314 the imagineer that gave a lecture at my school, said the dirt was used to add height to the mountain and to provide support instead of using extra steel.
Originally Posted By believe and besides, they dug up alot of dirt from the lagoon and some underground basements and such, too expensive to relocate the dirt. >>>> tallest,biggest,longest,etc raft ride. I mean they always shy away from that kind-of talk when it comes to their coasters.<<< Actually, they did advertise that for Splash Mountain. As far as the roller coasters go, most (if not all of the Disney coasters AREN'T the biggest, fastest, tallest.
Originally Posted By damon63 The biggest surprise in this article is the whole gold mine legend. Why isn't any of this mentioned in DCA's promo materials? Proof once again that the marketing department is asleep at the wheel.
Originally Posted By ArchtMig It's a shame that all the dirt inside Grizzly Peak has gone to such a waste, permanently incased inside the peak. It could have been used to create some landscaped berming elsewhere in the park where, if not totally able to block out the visual intrusion of the surrounding hotels and convention center, would have at least been a lot more attractive than all the plain walls and fences they built instead. This adds a second lost opportunity to the previously mentioned loss of a possible useful space inside the mountain. I agree that the themeing and detail of Grizzly Peak is beautiful, but I find the views of the Soarin' building, the Paradise Pier rides, and the backsides of the San Francisco buildings, and especially the Grand Californian hotel, intrude upon, and detract from, the wilderness feeling that the Grizzly area is supposed to evoke. Some would argue that the Grand Californian is wonderfully detailed in its own right, and fits in perfectly with the woodsy atmosphere of the Grizzly area. No doubt that the G.C. is nicely done, but its Craftsman Style theme is more historically derivative of structures that were built in towns and cities, not the wilderness. More fitting would have been a style patterned after the great wilderness lodges and hotels of the bygone age. Maybe not exactly like WDW's Wilderness Lodge "log cabin on steroids" style, but more like the Ahwanee in Yosemite. Unfortunately, the repetitive geometry of stack after stack of closely spaced rooms and windows makes the GC hotel incompatible with the wilderness area, no matter the theme. Its shear size and mass dwarfs the relatively compact Grizzly area that it abuts against. When I'm in that area, this leaves me with the feeling that I'm not in a wilderness setting that has a hotel, but rather, that I'm on the grounds of a huge hotel that happens to feature a raft ride and themed play areas. This is the exact same feeling I get from the big Las Vegas hotels, where there is no question that the hotel is the most important thing, and the hotel's themed attractions are supplemental. Disneyland is built around the idea of isolating its various themed areas and elements away from one another as much as possible, so that the guest's perception is totally contained within any single location. This helps to complete the illusion of being totally immersed in the environment that the designers have created, and is one of the reasons why people love Disneyland. And all of the other Disney parks for that matter, because that philosophy was basically carried through in each of them up to Animal Kingdom. That philosophy was thrown out the window with DCA. Barry Braverman (head of the DCA design team) has said that DCA celebrates all of its various parts by making them all visible from all of its various other parts. (Or words to that effect) I don't know if that truly was a basic design philosophy for DCA, or just some catchy public relations jargon that was dreamed up to put a positive spin on a less than positive realization that all of that stuff was going to visually clash. Personally, I think DCA is lesser for it. When you take a close up look at some of the individual details of DCA, such as the Grizzly area, you see work that is very "Disney" quality. But when you pull back to look at the big picture of what basic decisions were made and how it all comes together, I don't think it measures up to what Disney has proven it can accomplish.
Originally Posted By damon63 I wonder how much this will change once the trees grow. Ever seen pictures of the Rivers of America circa 1955?
Originally Posted By jonvn Do you realize how high a berm would have to be to keep out the surrounding buildings? And then how wide it would be at the base in order to support that height? You do realize, also, that in higher rides at Disneyland, you can see outside the park? The reality is that DCA and Disneyland are in the middle of an urban area. They do a fairly good job of blocking it out while in the parks, but once you get any kind of elevation while outside, you really can't do a whole lot.
Originally Posted By DouglasDubh <<It's a shame that all the dirt inside Grizzly Peak has gone to such a waste, permanently incased inside the peak.>> I hardly think it's going to waste. It's holding up the ride and the Grizzly sculpture. It's much less expensive to build a hill out of readily available dirt than construct a building out of concrete and steel.
Originally Posted By Briguy1314 "I hardly think it's going to waste. It's holding up the ride and the Grizzly sculpture. It's much less expensive to build a hill out of readily available dirt than construct a building out of concrete and steel" And thats exactly what they did!! It does make sense
Originally Posted By ArchtMig >>"It's much less expensive to build a hill out of readily available dirt than construct a building out of concrete and steel." That's not always true. If it were, the Matterhorn, Splash Mountain, and Big Thunder Mountain would have all been constructed on top of big mounds of dirt. Instead, they were built as hollow steel framework, then covered in a sculpted concrete finish. The Tree of Life at Disney's Animal Kingdom was built as a hollow superstructure precisely because they recognized the opportunity to do something valuable inside of it. The dirt in Grizzly Peak was readily available because they scooped it out of the Paradise Pier lagoon. If they didn't create the lagoon, they would most certainly have built Grizzly Peak out of a hollow steel superstructure, because importing that much dirt would have been prohibitively expensive. That much dirt isn't "dirt cheap". In a different era, other Imagineers would have used all that dirt to create various mounds and hills, etc., which would have allowed for much more interesting landscapes, instead of creating one singular mountain structure dominating the middle of the whole park, and leaving all the rest of it completely flat, save for the extremely tall buildings. >>"I wonder how much this will change once the trees grow. Ever seen pictures of the Rivers of America circa 1955." Yeah, that's a great point, and I've been wondering about that, myself. If the large trees around the perimeter of Grizzly Peak and the Challenge area are the type to grow a lot larger, (and if Disney lets them), that will help tremendously. Unfortunately, I don't think Disney wants the trees in front of the G.C. hotel to grow too big and block the expensive views of the guests into the park. So I think we will have to look across at all of those hotel rooms forever. jonvn, I think we've had this discussion before, but it was not my intention to say that a perimeter berm is all that it would take to block out all the visual intrusion at DCA. All I said is that a berm would be much more attractive than the blank walls. Because DCA is much closer to the outside world than Disneyland, to block out the exterior elements from within DCA takes something that, in itself, is very massive. Like buildings, and Grizzly Peak, for example. Of course, you totally defeat the idea of blocking out the outside world if you're going to throw in rides like the ferris wheel and the space shot. I would not have put in Paradise Pier at all if it were up to me, or at least, not any of these tall carnival rides, but that's a different subject, so I won't go on with that. For the life of me, I can not figure out why Braverman's team plunked down the tallest elements in DCA - Soarin', Muppets, Hyperion Theater, Bugs Life, and even Grizzly Peak - on the north side of the park, adjacent to DISNEYLAND, instead of the south side of the park, adjacent to Katella, the Hilton, and the Convention Center. Had all of these huge structures been situated along the southern edge of the park, they would have successfully blocked out all of the outside crap, and provided a nice backdrop to the rest of the park. As it stands now, I think DCA is bass ackwards, and should have been flip-flopped in orientation. I do suspect the reason has something to do with where they needed to orient the Grand Californian hotel. I suspect that the hotel advocates determined the location, and thus drove the rest of the park to conform around it as best it could. I believe that the hotel (and Downtown Disney) represents Disney's absolute top priority in the design and planning of the Disneyland Resort improvements, with the new theme park being relegated to a lower priority in terms of dealing with some of the basic design problems.
Originally Posted By damon63 >If the large trees around the perimeter of Grizzly Peak and the Challenge area are the type to grow a lot larger..< They will. Quite a bit in fact. They are redwoods.
