Big Thunder Mountain

The Wildest Ride in the Wilderness

Somewhere out past the edge of the map, a mining company dug too deep and too greedily, and the mountain decided it had opinions about that. The ore carts still run. Nobody is entirely sure who is driving them.

Your train leaves the station under its own steam, climbs into the rock, and then stops pretending to be a train ride at all. Three and a half minutes later you are back where you started, slightly out of breath, wondering whether that last turn was supposed to be quite so fast.

A Real Coaster, Not a Track You Look At

Big Thunder is driven by a custom tick-based path engine written for this park. The train follows an arc-length parameterised spline, which is a long way of saying it behaves like a physical object: it accelerates on the drops, it holds its speed through the banked turns, and it arrives back at the station on the same beat every single lap.

The speed profile was tuned by hand, curve by curve, over many evenings. A full circuit runs three minutes and twenty-three seconds. We know, because we timed it rather a lot.

How Rough Is It?

Fast, but friendly. Big Thunder is the park’s most energetic outdoor ride — quick drops, tight turns and a fair amount of rattling — without ever going upside down or into the dark for long. If you can handle a mine cart, you can handle this.

Stay seated until the train returns to the station and the gates open. The mountain has views, and they are best enjoyed from inside the train.