a top of mountain next to a hot spring and a long I70 in a small 10,000 person mountain town in the middle of Colorado's Rocky Mountains is a scattering of roller coasters, thrill rides, attractions, and cave tours, collectively known as Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park. Sitting 7,100 ft or 2200 M higher than sea level, it is the highest elevation amusement park in America and the only one perched at the top of a mountain. Before there were screams, however, there was just a whisper. It was Charles Darrow, a Glenwood Springs homesteader, who first caught the faint whistle of cool air escaping from deep inside Iron Mountain in the late 1800s and saw a business opportunity. The mountain had revealed its secret, and after exploring the fairy caves himself, Darrow opened them up for visitors on horseback in 1896. Then, in the mid-1910s, the caves again closed off, not on account of inaccessibility but economics. The attraction just didn't attract in the

midst of an economic downturn. So, they sat for another 70 years before Steve Beckley and his curiosity set off another era of evolution at top Iron Mountain. It was on an adventurous date, their second with his now wife Jean, when the couple bravely squeezed through a 9-inch wide passage known as Jam crack and laid their eyes on the expansive, awe-inspiring lower reaches of the King's Row cave. By then, the couple was sold on one another and on the idea that the caves needed to be seen by the public. The two convinced the owners to sell the land to them so they could reopen the cavern to the public. What whispered to Darrow more than a century prior was now poised to be a destination for hundreds of thousands. The Begley's instincts were spot-on; the caverns were an immediate draw. 500 people showed up for the first tour in 1999, and by 2003, more than 100,000 people were visiting annually, all scaling the mountain via bus in tedious switchbacks. But buses were not

enough as the tendons continued to rise to accommodate the crowds. The Beckley installed a trainway into 2003 so park goers could ride straight to the summit and forgo the bumpy bus ride of its backside. In the first year of its operation, the tram helped increase attendance by 50%, shuttling 300 people up per hour. But then another problem: while the transportation was more efficient in getting people up the mountain, the caves remained the same size, the tours roughly the same capacity. The upshot: longer and longer lines, people now waiting under the hot summer sun for up to 3 hours to tour the fairy caves. Something had to change, but rather than limit attendance, the Beckley went the other way and added capacity, dumping 1.5 million dollars into a master plan and slate of activities that people could do while they waited to explore the caverns. And as with the tram, the Beckley went all in. By 2005, guests could scale up the 32t rock climbing wall or they could strap

into the country's very first Alpine Coaster, a half-mile ride on a metal track that Steve personally traveled to Europe to secure from uncertain operators. Suddenly, fin the mountain was becoming a park as a virtuous cycle emerged. The more offerings, the bigger the crowds. Next came a zipline, then a 4D theater, and then a giant canyon swing. Once a modest park opened for curious cavers, Glenwood Caverns quickly transitioned into a veritable amusement park where people could spend an entire day perched precariously above the Colorado River. But just one piece was missing to fully earn that moniker: the most iconic feature of any amusement park, a roller coaster. And so, in 2012, 1,430 ft of twisted steel made its way up the mountain, and the transition was complete. Once up and running, the Cliffhanger became and remains the country's highest altitude roller coaster. The Cliffhanger has two hill climbs which quickly plunge into several angled loops, and it all unfolds in just 80 seconds. The ride is breathtaking, so

too was the process of buying it, perhaps counterintuitively given their size and relative d, and there is a secondhand market for amusement park rides, and it can get competitive. When Celebration City in Branson, Missouri put its coaster up for sale for just about 1th rack rate, Glenwood Caverns was interested, but so too were Elitch Gardens in Denver and Six Flags in Buffalo, New York, two far larger parks. Ultimately, the caverns placed a winning bid at $375,000, practically a Ste. But then there was the matter of getting it installed, which required 11 flatbed trucks traversing all the way to the top of the mountain, which along with refurbishing cost the park another $425,000. The Cliffhanger was worth it. While the Alpine Coaster was and remains the park's most popular ride, the Cliffhanger filled a niche as thrilling but not so thrilling that it would scare people away. It was and is an important piece to an ever-evolving puzzle that the management of Glenwood Caverns just

like that of every amusement park, is trying to figure out how to draw crowds in, how to minimize lines, how to maximize The Visitor experience, and how to turn a profit all simultaneously. In solving this puzzle, every ride has a purpose. Take the canyon swing. This ride is wildly inefficient in terms of load capacity and the number of cycles that can run at a given time, maxing out at just 80 people per hour. Just not many people can ride it very quickly. But because the swing launches out over a 1300t 400 met drop above the Colorado River and Glenwood Canyon, not as many people might want to ride it to begin with. But it serves two key purposes: one, to appeal to Adrenaline Junkies looking for the most thrilling experiences, and two, to act as something highly marketable, a ride that looks great in video or on social media, or even sounds good by Word of Mouth, fully exhibiting the Park's iconic landscape, sitting at top of mountain overlooking a Canon. On the other end of the spectrum

there's the mine wheel and the Wild West Express, both bought secondhand and relocated from Canada, and situated here and here. They're less marketable and more tame, but this helps alleviate line pressure on the cliff hanger and provides an alternative to the canyon swing for families wanting to hop on a ride together, and kids too small or too scared to stare down a 1300t drop while upside down. Sitting in between rides like the Wild West Express and the canyon swing is the giant Canyon flyer, a tree swing also pursued here, providing high suspended thrills with less required commitment and thrill than the latter. Then there's the zip line, which replaced the original zip line and isn't very efficient in terms of rider turnover, as it only seats two riders at a time, but makes the most of the park's unique vantage point, wasting riders 600 ft or 200 M up the line with mountain views that are hard to match. Because it was slow and in demand, the park doubled down and added a second variation of the same

ride directly next to it. Then there are the more extreme in 2017. The crystal tower, then called The Haunted mind drop, became the first and only underground drop tower in the world, plunging Riders into negative -2 and 2 GS and 110 ft or 35 M into Iron Mountain and in almost complete darkness. Where other Drop Tower in the world allow passengers to see where they're falling, the uniqueness of a ride that loads from the top and plummets into the ground prompted USA Today to call it one of the most anticipated rides of the year. So that's to say this ride is something unique that Riders can only get here, and therefore it can help attract press and social media attention. And Beyond the superlatives, its convenient location towards the lower reaches of the park also allowed Glenwood Caverns To Build A New Path, creating a walking Loop, further dissipating crowds, further adding areas to explore across a full day at the park with more draws, more rides, more attractions, and just more things to do.

now the lines were forming at the base of the gondola just to get people up the mountain and into the park. Now, even the Tramway, once a solution to moving people quicker, needed an upgrade. In 2019, the cavern spent $8 million to install a new six-person ski resort-style Gondola, capable of whisking 1,000 Riders per hour up the 1 and 1/2 mil or 2 and 1/2 km in 7 minutes. Almost 75% of Park goers are there for the rides, but about a quarter of people will simply take the gondola up and have a bite at the lookout Grill in a relaxed outing. But now, with the capacity to attract more visitors, the park wanted to push forward into the big leagues of rides. They wanted a ride that would break records, so they cracked a brochure. Not long after, the roller coaster industry began to buzz. In April 2021, gauer announced it would build a new record-breaking roller

coaster somewhere in the United States to debut in 2022. Coaster pundits speculated that it could be installed anywhere from Cedar Point to Dollywood. All Gersau said was that it would be in a high-profile location that guests would be racing to. Finally, the news dropped: Glenwood Caverns, the presumed Dark Horse potential location of the bunch, would be the new home of a customized Euro Fighter coaster with a gravity-defined 109° drop, which would make it the steepest roller coaster west of the Mississippi. And it lived up to the hype. Reviews on everything from Trip Advisor to Reddit to Tik Tok gushed over its dramatic views and hair-raising flips that exceeded their expectations. So, what makes it so thrilling? Or really, what makes any roller coaster thrilling? When designers set out to create a satisfying coaster, they want to construct a series of movements that riders experience as a cohesive, albeit hair-raising, Symphony rather than a one-and-one Screamfest. That's because intense flips and loops work best when they're balanced with

Brea moments of calm, which let writers process the thrill they've just experienced and steal themselves for the next. Engineers design coasters from beginning to end so that no part will exceed four or five G's, or the amount of force equal to four or five times the normal rate of gravity, the limit of what an average person can withstand for a short time. Nearly every roller coaster will have a mix of these components: hills, inversions, and brake runs. Defiance begins with an impressive hill and inversion known as the Twisted Top Hat. It combines a hill that lifts the rider straight up, or a camelback hill, and a turn. Any initial hill on a roller coaster is designed to accelerate, and this is no exception. It goes from 0 to 58 m or 93 km/h as it drops to this point. There's no braking as it's a total free fall powered by gravity and slowed down by the ride's later turns and inversions on Defiance. These later inversions include the heartline zero-G.

roll where the hill preceding it accelerates at an equal rate to the acceleration of gravity, which means functionally there is no gravitational force exerted on Riders when they flip upside down and they feel weightless. Defiance is also one of only five coasters in the US to boast a banana roll, an inversion that flips Riders upside down twice. At the very end, Riders come to a stop before the station in a break run. All of this, the hill, the inversions, the brake run, takes less than a minute to ride. There are hundreds of sensors along defiance's relatively short track, which communicate with this Central Monitor and alert ride operators to any malfunctions or slowdowns as quickly as possible. Despite its futuristic capabilities, though, defiance's jaw-dropping lift hill still relies on century-old coaster technology. It's supported by a chain lift hill, which has remained the coaster industry standard for over a century. This has two main features, the chain dog and the anti-rollback dog. The chain dog is how

the cart is pulled through the ride. It's a metal chain attaching the car to the coaster's track. It's threaded underneath the car's length and gives the car another point of contact in addition to its wheels. As the car travels up the Camelback Hill, it's pulled by the metal chain rather than a motor mounted on the vehicle itself. This ensures the car cannot physically move backward if the ride were to stop unexpectedly. This chain dog is complemented by an anti-rollback dog, which adds an additional backstop for emergencies. This anti-rollback dog is a feature of every ride vehicle. It's a blunted metal rod that drags between the car's wheels and along the chain hill's groove tracks to lock the vehicle in place and in case of an unexpected stop and counteract the backwards force a stalled ride vehicle will generate. Between these features, the lift chain hill ensures the ride can come to a complete stop even on a vertical hill without ricocheting backwards. And at the end of the ride, defiance's braking system ensures the

ride quickly comes to a complete stop without the need for electricity. It's called a magnetic induction brake system powered by a deceivingly simple physics concept known as an eddy current. As the ride enters the brake run, a series of embedded magnets in the coaster track will activate opposing magnets located in the ride vehicle itself. This causes a set of brake fin alloys to pop out from either side of the ride vehicle, which generates an opposing magnetic field that pushes back against the track magnets and slows them down. According to Newton's third law of physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so the force generated by a high-speed car entering the brake run will generate an opposing magnetic field with equally impressive strength that can bring the car slowly and smoothly back into the station. The faster the coaster cars travel, the stronger the brake fin alloys' opposing current will be, so the magnets alone safely slow the ride. This entirely magnetic system allows Defiance to operate without any physical braking mechanisms. There's no contact or wear components constantly bearing the

brunt of vast frictional force, which means there's no need for braking maintenance. And in case of emergency, this braking system can also operate without power. It's a safer, smoother, and cheaper brake system, all powered by the intuitive simplicity of a magnetic field. But beyond the fundamental experience of accelerating a ride vehicle to highway speeds, then slowing it down to a gentle stop less than a minute later, amusement rides need a multi-layered strategy of safety to avoid accidents. That's because at the scale of hundreds or thousands of riders per day, any margin for error not accounted for will eventually lead to an accident. So, the goal is not to make a ride safe once, but to have multiple systems and protocols that ensure safety simultaneously. The first layer is design, where potential concerns are addressed long before a ride's manufactured or sent to a park. In this, engineers are tasked with designing out problems that do arise. For example, the shoulder restraints involve a clever bit of engineering where their default

position is locked. Unlocking them requires an electric current that is fed into the car by a connector at the station. Therefore, once the vehicle has left the station, there simply is not a way that an electrical fault could cause the restraints to unlock. The ride vehicle doesn't have a way of doing so independently without that outside power. In the event a ride vehicle gets stuck on the track and needs to be evacuated, operators will bring a battery pack that applies this electric current to the ride vehicle itself to unlock the restraints. So broadly designing rides so that the failure state is safe rather than unsafe is a key tenant of ensuring that even most mechanical faults can't hurt the rider. Then the second layer is guard rails. On top of Designing out as many safety risk factors as possible, ride manufacturers and Parks will create these protocols to ensure a second layer of safety. Glenwood Cav's manual safety tests start every day at 7:00 a.m. with teams conducting their daily inspection protocol of each ride. Then before every ride cycle in Defiance, the operator will

conduct their own manual safety check, including physically checking each shoulder restraint. Even though the ride computer can detect when a restraint is latched, this manual check serves as the guard rail, a second layer of safety in the extremely unlikely instance that the first layer fails. The next safety layer is planning for the worst-case scenario, creating contingencies or detailed strategies and backups for if things do go wrong. On the Defiance coaster, one contingency is for this: the Camel Back Hill. If the ride lost power, for example, the vehicle would still be pushed through to the end by the sheer force of this hill alone, as long as the car reached the top of the hill before losing power. But if it hadn't yet cleared the hill before it lost power, it gets stuck, which requires a contingency plan for how to get riders out. One is the fact that the ride, like most, has a backup generator capable of running it even if the grid goes dark. But the second contingency is this lift tower. If, due to compounding power failure or some

other fault. Riders get stuck on the hill. It allows operators to safely access and evacuate riders in that event by way of an embedded elevator that spans The Hills Height. But rides themselves aren't the only risk factor that Parks need to mitigate. Just simply bringing thousands of people together is a risk factor, especially when they're on top of a mountain only reachable by Gondola or winding dirt road. Colorado's unpredictable weather with all too frequent afternoon thunderstorms means that the park might close rides or shut down the Mountaintop altogether if lightning is within 10 miles. Most rides will shut down, including all of the park thrill rides. The park has an always active lightning monitor that constantly tracks how close the strikes are to the park. If lightning is within 5 miles of the park, all rides and the gondola will shut down too. They need that time since it takes about 7 minutes to clear all Riders, close down the gondola, and ground a lightning rod so it won't be

irreparably damaged if it is struck by lightning. The gondola and rides will then reopen when 10 minutes have passed without a lightning strike in the 5 Mile boundary. The park also has a radar system that constantly monitors the storm cells in the Park's vicinity, located here inside of the gondola's control room. In most cases, this system will identify potentially harmful storms before they descend on the park and give officials time to prepare. However, if the radar shows storm cells directly above the park, officials will immediately decide to shut down operations right then and there. During the Summer monsoon season, storms will often only last between 30 to 45 minutes, meaning guests will only be stuck in the park temporarily. But in the event the gondola can't reopen, the park fires up its Fleet of buses to shuttle guests down via their service road. But the other particular risk factor born out of Glenwood Canyon's unique location is that of wildfire. It is surrounded by largely undeveloped fire-prone Wilderness and in

the dry Colorado summers. Fires are common. Just four years ago, the Grizzly Creek fire burned thousands of acres within ey shot of the park. Well, typically, fires are slow-moving enough that the park just simply wouldn't open if it were within a risky distance from one. It also has developed a protocol of what to do if a fire unexpectedly emerges while the park is already open. If wilderness within 5 miles is burning, the park and the Garfield County sheriff and emergency management office will likely decide to evacuate, which the park can do at an accelerated pace with the use of both its gondola and buses. But the lack of direct public road access does mean that there are limits to how fast it can evacuate. So, in the event of something going really wrong, a quick shift in winds, a nearby lightning strike, anything, the park does have a rather unique way of sheltering its thousands of guests in place. They go to the caves. The 2020 Grizzly Creek Fire proved to the park that the caves do stay smoke-free, even when it's intolerably thick.

outside, they've pre-positioned emergency supplies within each of their two cave tour areas, including snacks, first aid, space blankets, tourniquets, water, and even parts to build a rudimentary restroom. Enough to get by until emergency crews can assist in a more full-scale evacuation. As it is with the ride specifically, then it is with the park generally. Safety measures by themselves aren't enough. A park requires carefully thought-through layers of measures. This is emblematic of the core difficulty of running an amusement park. It's not necessarily that it's difficult to give a guest a good, safe, valuable experience. Once the difficulty is in doing so over and over and over again, up to thousands of times per day. That's because the guest's experience is singular. They experience the park once, while the park experiences each guest in countless different ways. Through each ride, each line, each employee, each concession stand, each bathroom, through every single element of the park, the guest perceives. So, each and every day, the employees of Glenwood Caverns and any amusement park clock in.

to play their small role in the endless pursuit of perfecting that symphonic experience. There's a very particular reason we filmed this video at Glenwood Caverns, one that I'm sure many of you have already realized. It's that this is also the location where we filmed the finale of our nebula original show, The Getaway, in that we put our contestants through a series of challenges involving the caverns as rides to gain the chance to win the final prize. The audience feedback on that episode was great. Many seemed to think it was the best episode in the series, and you probably could watch it by itself without having seen the rest of the series if you want. However, to give a little context on the show, we basically told the contestants that this was an elimination-style show where they had to figure out who was the secret saboteur in order to win. But we actually just told them all they were the secret saboteur, so they were all trying to covertly sabotage everything despite the

fact that they were actually all on the same team, and nobody was trying to figure them out. As you can imagine, this led to chaos, and of course, the reason we were able to afford to make such a relatively high-budget show, you know, cast crew size of 25, by the way, was thanks to the hundreds of thousands of Nebula subscribers. As I'm sure you know by now, Nebula is the creator-founded, creator-run, and creator-owned streaming service designed to be the best ecosystem to foster innovative, engaging shows and movies that you're just not getting out of Hollywood. In addition to The Getaway, there's a great show by Neo called Underexposure, too, by Real Life Lore called Modern Conflicts, and The War Room, a new short film by Jesse Gender called Identities, and more are coming all the time, like Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend, an upcoming release from Philosophy Tube that I'm really looking forward to. Nebula's analytics show that a far higher proportion of people who sign up stay subscribed than with major streaming services, which I believe

indicates that the users find it more worthwhile. For example, I haven't even mentioned yet that on top of all that original content, you get our normal videos ad and sponsorship free. And it's the same deal for hundreds of other handpicked top-quality creators. So, if you want to see what it's all about, make sure to use our link.

How an Amusement Park Works

Wendover Productions is all about explaining how our world works. From travel, to economics, to geography, to marketing and more, every video will leave you with a little better understanding of our world. New videos go out every other Tuesday.