On September 4th, 2017, my family and I drove 2 hours west of our home to pay a short visit to the Mt. Olympus Water and Theme Park in the Wisconsin Dells. Despite living relatively close, we had never actually been to this park before. In fact, this was only my second time visiting the Dells area in my life, which is pretty odd for a being a native Wisconsinite.
We arrived at the park around 11:30, about an hour and a half after the park had opened. This was probably our first mistake of the day, as the park was already super crowded due to it being Labor Day Weekend. By the time we parked, got our wristbands, and walked into the park, it was already nearing 12 o’clock.
Our first ride of the day would be Hades 360, the park’s Gravity Group Inverting Wooden Coaster. Due to it being the most popular ride in the park, and only having one-train operations, we ended up waiting close to an hour for the ride.
Although it’s operations were atrocious, Hades 360 was actually quite a good coaster. It has an awesome pre-lift section including a forceful drop out of the station, two pitch-black tunnels, and it’s one of the few wooden coasters in the world to have an inversion. The ride is severely underrated in my opinion, and is probably my 3rd or 4th favorite wooden coaster I’ve ridden.
By the time we got off Hades, it was already around 1 o’clock, and we knew we were going to have to cut some of the attractions we were planning to do. The park is home to 4 wooden coasters, 7 Go-Kart tracks, and a number of cool flat rides, and we were planning on doing all of them. However, due to long lines and heavy crowds, it wasn’t going to work out that way. We started heading towards the Cyclops wooden coaster, and…..the ride was closed. It would stay that way for the rest of the day, which was very disappointing.
Instead, we headed towards Pegasus, the “family” wooden coaster. I put family in quotations because good god does this thing throw you around. It was one of those old-looking wooden coasters that I would have probably thought was “too sketchy to ride” if I wasn’t a coaster enthusiast. It did give some decent airtime though!
After Pegasus, we headed towards Zeus, our final coaster of the day. Another classic woodie, Zeus used to be the tallest coaster in the park before Hades came around. It’s still at a nice height of about 90 feet though, and offers a fantastic amount of airtime during and after the first drop! The only problem is every single turn on this coaster is one of the most painful things you’ll ever feel in your entire life. Although I got off the ride relatively unscathed, both my Dad and brother got off it with back and neck pains. The ride is definitely in need of a re-track, but I doubt the people running Mt. Olympus see it as a priority.
By the time we rode the 3 open wooden coasters, my family and I were already wishing we could just be done. We decided to just ride one of the Go-Karts, that being the iconic Trojan Horse Track where you actually drive through a large Trojan horse…
…except, you don’t drive through the horse anymore. Out of all the disappointments at Mt. Olympus, this was by far the worst. Apparently they blocked off the spiral up to the Trojan horse, so the track essentially became your standard Go-Kart track with nothing special. It really was quite the bummer, and I hope Mt. Olympus reopens the Trojan Horse part sometime in the future.
After one Go-Kart ride, we decided that we all just wanted to be done. The park was way to crowded to be properly enjoyed, and was overall one of the most unsuccessful trips to a theme park I’ve ever had. I guess we have stuff to go back and do sometime, but I can’t say we’ll be making another trip to Mt. Olympus anytime soon. Perhaps we’ll have a longer Dells trip in our future where we can give the park another chance, but for now It’ll remain in my memories as an overcrowded, poorly operated theme park with only one reason to go: Hades 360.
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