Fun, but only a little bit.
Written: Jul 09 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Not crowded, beautiful scenery.
Cons: Way past its prime.
The Bottom Line: Ghost Town in the Sky desperately needs a makeover--until then, spend your time and money elsewhere.
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| tracyjenkins's Full Review: Ghost Town in the Sky |
My husband, I, and our two children visited Ghost Town on a Sunday in July. Overall, we enjoyed ourselves, but the place seems to be way past its prime. The park itself is in a stunningly beautiful setting, way up on a mountainside. You park, purchase tickets ($20.95 adults, $13.95 children) and then ascend the mountain in one of three ways--van, incline elevator, or chair lift. The day we went, the incline elevator (a trolley-type thing) was not working so we took the chair lift. The ride up and down the mountain was the best part of the visit--it is long and relaxing with amazing scenery.
When you get off the chair lift, you are in the "Mining Town" section of the park. The main attraction in that section--and the whole park--is the Black Widow, a wild and twisty roller-coaster. At least it looked wild and twisty--it was also "closed for maintenance". We each received $2 off our admission due to the closure of the Black Widow. Also in the mining town are bumper cars (you can only drive in one direction--no head-on collisions allowed!), the ghost mine (a haunted house attraction with various semi-gory but very dusty displays--and one very bored employee), the mystery shack (a tilted room that has been pretty much abandoned by management), a few half-hearted skeeball games, a popular shooting gallery, and a couple of closed food shacks.
Next, you get on a bus/trolley thing that takes you up a bit of steep hill to the "Ghost Town" area. This area is set up to look like a town in the wild west. There are a few eating areas, shops, and again, the very, very dusty, out-of-date, mostly abandoned displays such as a jail, barbershop, etc. Honestly, I doubt anyone has gone into the old schoolhouse or sheriff's office and cleaned, repaired, or replaced any of the weird-looking, faded, musty, old mannequins in 2 decades. The main excitement in the ghost town area is the hourly gun fights that take place on Main Street. At 2:00 about 100 people were lined up along the street in ready anticipation. The whole gunfight took about 5 or 6 minutes and consisted mainly of corny jokes, repeated by the guy on the microphone because no one could hear what the gunslingers were saying. There were a couple of funny moments and several loud gunshots, but the whole thing was a let-down. Also in the ghost town section is a place called "Thriller Theater". This was advertised on their billboard as a place to see free cowboy movies, but it was a tiny room with about 6 folding chairs--and no movie! By this time, things were so bad they were funny.
Walking slightly up the hill you come to "Kiddieland" which has about 4 or 5 rides for very small children. My 4-year-old daughter was too big for all but one of those rides. The 2 women running the rides were very sweet and seemed to get a customer only every 10 minutes or so.
Up one more level is the "Mile High Ride Area" which has several rides for older children. These were all spinning carnival rides (swings, scrambler, etc.) that can induce motion sickness in anyone prone to that sort of thing. Again, there was no waiting in line for rides.
The highest spot has a few more spinning rides (swings again!) and a picnic area. One nice feature of this park is that they let you bring in a cooler for a picnic and even get it to the top picnic area for you and haul it down again. When we got to the picnic area, there was one other family eating and our lonely cooler sitting unattended on a picnic table. We enjoyed the view and ate our lunch.
Also at the top is Fort Cherokee, which had two Indian-themed rides for the smallest children, and an Indian dance show. The dance show was held in a strange pavilion made (as per ancient Indian custom) of cement and plywood. Between the announcer selling face painting, pushing us to go see his wife sing at some country western music hall in town, inviting us to gamble at the casino on the nearby reservation, and informing us that they were not paid employees of the park and would we donate some cash as we left, we saw 3 or 4 short Indian dances done by mostly bored performers. It was truly bad, however by this time, we hadn't really expected much. There is also a Country & Western show in that area that we didn't see.
I know this review has been very critical, but let me say that we did have a good time. Our 4 and 7-year-old children loved the spinny rides, thought the black light dance in the Indian Pavilion was "cool", and happily picked up rubber bullets after the gun fight. My husband and I, however, think that the park needs a lot of loving care and probably a large infusion of cash to make it worth the visit--or the money.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
tracyjenkins
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Member: Tracy Jenkins
Reviews written: 7
Trusted by: 2 members
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