Mt Olympus
I’ve been planning a Mt Olympus trip for a while since it’s technically my home park (even though I consider SFGAM that). Since I had a day off at work on the Tuesday after Memorial Day, I figured that would be the perfect time. WI schools aren’t out yet so a random weekday should be really empty!
Got to the park a little after opening. (Quick aside - in case you’re like me and wondering how much park tickets costs, it’s $19.99.) The park gate walks you through a gift shop and then down a really steep hill. Zeus and Hades, probably the biggest coasters in the park, have their entrances right along this path. Cyclops and Pegasus are a little deeper into the park.
Zeus - 30/100
This ride is definitely a tale of two halves. This ride is basically just an out and back coaster that uses some of the surrounding geography. The first half was exceptionally smooth with plenty of airtime.
As soon as we hit the turnaround, it got terribly bumpy. It was incredibly painful, getting thrown around. I think Mt Olympus knows about this issue since the very end of the ride was definitely retracked, as evidenced by the fresh wood which sharply contrasts with the old wood. I only gave this a 30 because of the very fun first half of the ride, otherwise it’d be lower.
Hades 360 - 83/100
(2 rides) Hades 360 is definitely the star of this little park. I’ve ridden two Gravity Group woodies before (Boardwalk Bullet and Ravine Flyer 2) and found them to be pretty fun. I have heard that Hades is rough so I wasn’t expecting terribly much.
I’m glad to say that I was totally wrong. My first ride, I ended up sitting in the far back. Apparently on Hades they require all seats to be filled? Or at least it seemed like it. I ended up being able to skip half of the line as they needed a single rider to fill the back train.
My ride in the back on Hades was excellent. The pre-lift portion was very fast and gave some really decent airtime. The first drop was really fast in the back and I absolutely loved the tunnel. It was pitch dark so I couldn’t see anything coming, allegedly there’s a 90* banked section but I wouldn’t have guessed it! Since you can’t see it’s hard to judge speed but it sounded (yeah, I realize that’s kind of weird) really, really fast hearing only the roar of the train.
The section of the ride on the other side of the parking lot was awesome. The corkscrew was good with a little bit of hangtime but my favorite part was the 110* banked turn. After that, you go through an airtime hill right into the same tunnel back to the main park.
Same as the first tunnel, this also feels incredibly fast. After flying through that, you run through a few more airtime hill, and then do some turns and pull back into the station. This coaster was way more smooth than I thought it would be and just blew me away.
My second ride on Hades was still good but not nearly as amazing. I sat second from the front this time. It felt a lot slower, which makes sense. It still felt reasonably smooth but it didn’t give that bat out of hell (pun definitely intended) feeling as my first ride.
Pegasus - 55/100
I don’t have a ton to say about Pegasus. Another walk on where I sat in the very back. This is another out and back coaster, meant to be smaller than Zeus. It was a fun little ride, a little rougher than Hades but not as bad as Zeus. It gave a few good moments of airtime but otherwise, not a ton to write home about.
Cyclops - 65/100
Cyclops was the ride I was maybe looking forward to the most. I remember reading about the coaster where you had to be 18 to sit in the back seat for many years and this is it! Or was it, rather. Allegedly, the drop that would give the crazy airtime was reprofiled to not be nearly as extreme.
I waited for this ride all morning. It was listed as “Delayed” and every time I walked by it, there would be a few ride ops in the station but no trains cycling. Eventually, I gave up on it and went back to my car to get my camera and start taking pictures. As I stood near Hades waiting to trains to cycle so I could get some action shots, I saw trains start to cycle on Cyclops. I immediately gave up what I was doing and went to ride and I got on the first public train of the day!
This ride was a lot of fun. I sat near the middle of the train since I didn’t want to wait for Mt Olympus’ slow operations to cycle the current train. In the middle, I still got a bunch of airtime and had a lot of fun. It was also much smoother than I thought it was going to be. Although it was a short layout, the last drop right in front of the station was definitely my second favorite element on a coaster in this park. I can definitely imagine how this ride would’ve been insane before the reprofile!
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to ride the only other credit at the park, Little Titans, because I was way too tall. Ohh well!
After getting all of the rides out of the way, I walked around the park and enjoyed the (sparse) themeing they had up!
My favorite portion of the park theming-wise was at the back where they named all of their food stands to Greek gods!
So all in all a good day at Mt Olympus. The one complaint I had with it was operations. The operations were awful. All of the coasters were one train and the ride ops were very slow to dispatch. Luckily, there were few people at the park or else it could’ve easily been hour+ wait times. The cycle on Hades was probably around 6 minutes with Zeus and the others around 4 or 5. That’s the only thing that prevented me from riding Hades a lot more that I did.