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"Mind if I read this first?"
I had been driving uphill for a very long time. Kansas City is about 800 feet, and Denver is, as everyone knows, at 5,280 feet. So in about 600 miles of driving, I came up about 4,500 feet. That works out to about a 0.14% grade...which, quite frankly, isn't entirely accurate just because Kansas must certainly be flatter than that!
Thursday would prove to be a much more interesting day of driving. Glenwood Springs is only 160 miles from Denver, and sits at an altitude of 5,916 feet. That's an increase of only 636 feet, suggesting that the road should be nearly flat. That doesn't tell the whole story. Driving IR-70 across Colorado means climbing to places that are nearly 12,000 feet. Now it is an Interstate highway, so while it winds a bit, it is limited to about an 8% grade most of the time, and it's always at least two lanes in each direction, so it is an easy drive. But it's also a lot more interesting than the drive through Missouri and Kansas. IR-70 even represents a series of engineering accomplishments, as it climbs the mountains, blasts through the mountains, and finally hangs off the side of a canyon overlooking the Colorado river. I stopped for lunch at a fast-food joint in Vail, and saw how a remote location in a resort town can increase standard menu prices by about 50%. This was, unfortunately, the seemingly-inevitable day of a multi-day driving trip when I start breaking down. I find myself suffering from various forms of discomfort and all kinds of weird ailments mostly related to the sudden changes in sleep, food, and activity. Add to that many hours spent sitting in the car, and I simply didn't feel very good. I couldn't identify any particular problem, I just didn't feel good. Unfortunately there was nothing I could really do about it except to keep on going.
When I arrived at Glenwood Caverns, I nearly missed the place. There is a small, gravel parking lot to the side of the road, and a very small building. Behind that building a much larger facility is under construction, but it isn't entirely clear what it is going to be. I parked the car, put the roof up to shield my seat from the sun, grabbed the camera, and entered the building. For $10, I bought passage to the top of the mountain and proceeded outside to the tramway waiting area. The Glenwood Caverns facility is located near the top of a mountain and is accessed by an elaborate Poma fixed-grip ropeway. A sign on the door noted that the lift is a "pulse lift" and would slow halfway up the mountain. I didn't understand quite what that meant until I saw just how far it is to the top of the mountain. The ropeway has twelve gondolas on it, each seating up to six people, with the gondolas divided into groups of three. The gondolas are carefully spaced so that when there is one group at the bottom station, another group is at the top and the other two groups are actually passing each other at the middle of the run. When there are no gondolas in the stations, the lift runs at high speed, but for loading and unloading it slows to a very slow crawl.
Now you have certainly heard of "exit through retail". That's what happens here. At the top of the lift, there is a good size building containing a gift shop, sales desk, and a restaurant with commanding views of the valley below. Outside, a broad gravel midway extends in a semicircle around the mountain and defines the facility. To the right, an archway leads to a paved path that goes down to the cave entrance. This is, of course, the core business, offering tours of the cave. Along the path is achildren's play area and a small shed for a nightly dinner theater offering. At the end of the path there is a split. Down the hill is the cave exit, and up a stairway is the canyon swing, an odd attraction with four seats that looks like an odd combination of a Skycoaster and a Screamin' Swing. Think of a Skycoaster with four seats, two rows of two situated back to back. I considered riding, but decided against it. I really was not feeling good at all, though the swing looked like it would be a lot of fun, as it is positioned to swing out over the valley, a distance of roughly a thousand feet to the ground.
I hiked to the other end of the midway. At the other end is a Zip Line attraction. This unit was even odder than the swing, and looked to be built by the same manufacturer. On this, riders sit in what look a little like chairlift seats, or inverted coaster cars, which ride on a pair of guide ropes. The cars are hauled backward to the far end of the line, then cut loose. They slide down the guide ropes until they are literally caught by a braking line which is essentially a bungee cord. The cars bounce off of this brake line and roll backward, and oscillate back and forth a few times as the tension on the braking line is increased until the cars are finally stopped at the loading platform. I didn't ride this one either, though again it looked like fun. It looked like fun, but I wasn't sure I wanted to do all of that bouncing around the way I felt.
Right in the middle of the midway, on the cliff side, was the attraction I came up here for. It's a very odd unit which is a sort of a bastard love child of a roller coaster and an alpine slide. The track looks kind of like steel coaster track, with tubular steel road rails, and a pair of brake rails in between the road rails. The cars are little sleds, which seat two riders in an inline tandem fashion. The cars are locked to the track by means of upstops that instead of riding beneath the road rails, actually are positioned beneath the brake rails. This differs from a roller coaster car in that it is patron directed: there is a pair of linked brake handles (one on each side) which allow the rider to control the speed by lowering a brake shoe against the brake rails. Once the rider is situated, the operator gives a quick briefing (tells how the brakes work and warns the rider not to stop until past the signal arch at the bottom of the hill), verifies that there is sufficient space behind the previous rider, and gives the sled a shove to send it down the hill. In that way, it's not entirely unlike the now-derelict Pipeline Express at Putt 'N Pond Action Park. This is a much longer ride, though, and it goes a lot faster. The track snakes its way down the mountainside. Most of the track is low to the ground, and almost continuously downhill. There are some undulations and zig-zags in the route to give it some interest, but for the most part it's a bit like a bobsled run. Accordingly, the speed builds almost continuously, and the lack of banking on the curves actually prompted me to use just a tiny bit of braking at critical points. You're sitting on an open sled, secured only by an automotive-style seat belt (albeit a much better fitting one than the one in the car I was driving on this trip) and I am a kind of a big guy, so I did want to limit the lateral forces a little bit! The ride goes about halfway down the side of the mountain, then engages with a lift conveyor. The car has a toothed rope grip on the bottom which grabs onto a wire rope which carries the sled (and its rider(s)) back up the hill to the starting point.
The ride is a lot of fun, but for the purposes of my coaster count, I think I've decided to call this one a "!coaster" first because of the rider-actuated braking system (and the compromises to the layout that requires...i.e. to make sure that it does not go uphill in the gravity section), and second because I'm not certain that it is fair to classify a device as an amusement ride if the operator requires a signed liability waiver from each passenger. The ride is a lot of fun, though, and had I not been running so terribly late, I would have ridden again. Instead, I took the lift back down to the bottom of the mountain, got the car set up again, dropped the roof, and headed down the road through the Colorado River valley towards Grand Junction. There I had another quick stop to make, and I might as well talk about it here.
"It's a little mind-bending, actually!"
Soda Jack's is an ice cream shop in the corner of a small strip-mall, next to an REI outlet. Now of all the hole-in-the-wall places I could have stopped, why would I pick this one?
Easy. I wanted to see the roller coaster.
It's a typical enough ice cream shop, with a spacious prep area behind the counter and just a few tables for seating. Above the tables, though, is a most unusual creation. I believe it is called the Ice Screamer and to the best of my knowledge it is the world's only inverted inverted coaster. It was built a few years ago (circa 2000, I think) by M.A.G.num Model Coasters, meaning, of course, well-known Gravity Guy Mike Graham. This is, as I understand it, the ride that ultimately led to the development of CoasterDynamix.
It's not unusual for an ice cream parlor to have a miniature train hanging from the ceiling. It's just one of those things you might expect from a classic ice cream shop. So it isn't much of a stretch to go from the miniature train to the miniature roller coaster. Add in a stroke of inspiration to suggest an inverted coaster with the seats hanging below the track, then construct the whole thing so that it hangs from the ceiling. It's neat just to see this thing. There is no station, but there is a queue of riders painted on the wall. There are no riders in the train, and that is probably a good thing, since the shoulder bars are glued shut. The lift hill goes up along the wall and into a cavity above the finished ceiling. The first drop comes back down out of the hole, and the rest of the ride, with its full complement of inversion elements, stays in sight. Some areas where the paint has been removed from the track spine suggest that some track maintenance has been done on the ride since it was installed.
Watching the Ice Screamer operate, you can get a real appreciation for what Graham accomplished with the ride. Because the whole ride is reasonably proportioned, and apart from being upside-down looks perfectly reasonable. And yet, the thing operates, and it completes the circuit. You see, there is a very basic problem in coaster model building: velocity is proportional to the square root of the height, and gravity does not scale. What this means is that a scale model coaster will not work properly. The speeds will be way off, and it may not be able to climb proportionally sized hills. And yet this ride, not being representative of any particular real coaster, looks great and works beautifully. I hate to think what the accelerations are through some of the inversions, but I'm way too big to ride it to find out. Graham went through a lot of work to design a train that works, and to work out a friction profile that let his ride work reliably. Now, half a dozen years on, the ride is still running very well, and is obviously enough of an attraction to draw customers to this little ice cream shop. Well, hey, it got me to come, and yes, I did buy a chocolate milk shake.
By the time I got done watching the coaster, it was too late for me to drive all the way to Las Vegas. I probably should have just found a room in Grand Junction and left early in the morning. As a matter of fact, that is exactly what my parents counseled me to do. I looked at the clock, I looked at the odometer, and I decided I really needed to go a little further, another four or five hours down the road. Then I looked at the map. Green River is a hundred miles away, then St. George is 400 miles away, and there is almost nothing in between. Knowing that I wanted to not only get to Las Vegas the next day, but that I wanted to spend some time there, I opted for Green River.
The next hundred miles made Kansas seem interesting.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
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