Aerial Antics: Valleyfair!

Welcome to Valleyfair! - the 2nd park ever to be a part of the Cedar Fair family, after Cedar Point of course. And half it's moniker makes up half the company's name, which pretty much gives it eternal bragging rights.

The park opened in 1976, and the High Roller, seen above, was the park's biggest attraction at the time. The coaster was designed by International Amusement Devices and thrills passengers from the moment the train drops from its 70 ft. lift.

Just four years later, the park decided it was time to turn their guests upside down. Corkscrew debuted that year, featuring a single vertical loop and a double corkscrew. The ride travels directly over a pond that's at the heart of Valleyfair, giving riders a nice inverted view of the water below them.

1989 marked the park's next big coaster investment - Excalibur. A unique steel ride on wooden supports, Arrow designed it almost as a mine train on steroids. It takes riders well outside the main boundary of the park, completes and oddly twisted figure 8, and then returns them to the station.

Time to go out of sequence a bit for this image. On the left we have a non-coaster ride at the park, the S&S designed Xtreme Swing. The air powered, high swinging ride started taking riders breath away back in 2006.

The Mad Mouse coaster on the right was a replacement for the park's original wild mouse style ride, Rails, which called Valleyfair home from 1979 to 1998. Arrow only ever made 4 of their Mad Mouse rides, and oddly Cedar Fair is currently the owner of three of them.

Renegade, a Great Coasters Int. ride was (obviously) under construction when this photo was taken. So let's call it winter 2006.

But then 2007 rolled in, and the ride was completed - and I must say it's rather beautiful to look at. The ride makes great use of space, curling into an available pocket on the edge of the park, then sprawling back into open space that was previously undeveloped.

We've looked at most of the big rides that Valleyfair has to offer, yet ignored one of their biggest. Wild Thing, with it's attention grabbing green color scheme, opened in 1996 as the first of several Cedar Fair Morgan designed hyper coasters. Also peeking up in front is the twisted spike of Steel Venom, the park's Intamin Impulse coaster.

As always, to see Bing's aerials of the park, click here.

Also - I've started to back myself into a wall with only having a lot of big theme parks left for Aerial Antics, at least until Bing updates some parks. So I ask you, what parks do you want to see featured? Leave a comment!