Admin: ParksWiki backfill wave 4

2026-11-14T15:32:30Z

ParksWiki backfill wave 4

New page

{{Infobox attraction
| name = Big Grizzly Mountain Runaway Mine Cars
| park = [[Hong Kong Disneyland]]
| land = [[Grizzly Gulch]]
| type = Steel launched mine train coaster
| opened = July 14, 2012
| designer = [[Walt Disney Imagineering]]
| manufacturer = Vekoma
| height = 88 ft (27 m)
| status = Operating
}}

'''Big Grizzly Mountain Runaway Mine Cars''' is a steel roller coaster in [[Grizzly Gulch]] at [[Hong Kong Disneyland]]. Built by the Dutch manufacturer Vekoma and designed with [[Walt Disney Imagineering]], it is the centrepiece of its land: a runaway mine train that races through Big Grizzly Mountain and around the whole township, travelling forwards, backwards and, after a mid-ride incident with dynamite, forwards again very quickly indeed. It opened to the public on July 14, 2012, following soft openings in June, as the headline attraction of Grizzly Gulch, the second and largest of the three lands added in the park's expansion programme.<ref>{{cite web |title=Big Grizzly Mountain Runaway Mine Cars |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Grizzly_Mountain_Runaway_Mine_Cars |website=Wikipedia |access-date=2026-11-14}}</ref>

== History ==

Grizzly Gulch was created exclusively for Hong Kong Disneyland as part of a roughly US$460 million expansion that also produced Toy Story Land in 2011 and Mystic Point in 2013.<ref>{{cite web |title=Hong Kong Disneyland to launch new Grizzly Gulch attraction |url=https://www.ttgasia.com/2012/06/20/hong-kong-disneyland-to-launch-new-grizzly-gulch-attraction/ |website=TTG Asia |access-date=2026-11-14}}</ref> Hong Kong had no Frontierland when it opened in 2005, and Grizzly Gulch filled that role in a different form: instead of a generic frontier, Imagineering built a single, tightly storied mining town in California's Sierra Nevada, founded — in the fiction — on August 8, 1888, and dominated by one mountain.

That mountain is a substantial piece of scenery in its own right, standing about 88 feet (27 metres) tall. Unlike a conventional mine train that stays inside its mountain, the Runaway Mine Cars were designed as what Disney called a multidirectional, terrain-style coaster: the track leaves the mountain, crosses the town, skirts the geysers and returns, so the ride is part of the land's kinetic scenery even for guests who never board it. Contemporary opening coverage stressed three novelties — cars that run both forwards and backwards for roughly a third of the journey, a layout that traverses the entire themed land, and tracks that crisscross the landscape so trains appear to chase one another.<ref>{{cite web |title=Grizzly Gulch, Hong Kong Disneyland's Newest Land, Opening July 14 |url=https://www.inparkmagazine.com/grizzly-gulch-hong-kong-disneylands-newest-land-opening-july-14/ |website=InPark Magazine |access-date=2026-11-14}}</ref>

The coaster is often compared with [[Big Thunder Mountain Railroad]] in spirit and with [[Expedition Everest]] in mechanics. It was the second Disney coaster to include a backwards section, after Expedition Everest at Disney's Animal Kingdom, though here the reversal comes from a story gag — a snapped lift cable — rather than a yeti.

== Experience ==

Guests board 24-passenger mine trains inside the Big Grizzly Mountain Mining Company building, among the sawmill, shaft equipment and the sound of a bear snoring somewhere it should not be. The backstory holds that three grizzly bears — Rocky, and a mother and cub called Mother Lode and Nugget — are protected in Grizzly Gulch because their discovery of gold made the town's fortune, but that their interference periodically sends mine cars, and anyone in them, somewhere unintended.

That is exactly what happens. Leaving the station towards Tunnel 8, the train passes Rocky, an Audio-Animatronic bear using a track switch as a back-scratcher, who inadvertently diverts the cars into Tunnel 4. The train climbs a conventional chain lift up the mountain, but near the summit, by Shaft 44, the lift cable appears to break. The train rolls back down the hill in reverse, takes a different route and comes to rest in another mine — where Mother Lode and Nugget are waiting. Nugget, reaching for a miner's hanging catch of fish, sets off a crate of TNT, and the explosion becomes the ride's launch: the train is blasted forwards out of the mine on a third stretch of track.

The finale is a fast, low sweep of twists and turns around the land, over and past the geysers and townsfolk, before the brakes. On the way back to the station the train passes the punchline: Mother Lode and Nugget sitting in a wrecked, blackened mine car, covered in the fish they were after all along.

The statistics underline how much ride is packed into the town. The Vekoma layout runs to about 1,100 metres (3,600 feet) of track, combining a chain lift with a linear induction launch for the explosion sequence. The result sits deliberately between a family mine train and a thrill coaster — gentle enough in its first half to lull first-time riders, and disorderly enough thereafter that no one describes it as tame.

== See also ==
* [[Grizzly Gulch]]
* [[Hong Kong Disneyland]]
* [[Expedition Everest]]
* [[Big Thunder Mountain Railroad]]
* [[Mystic Manor]]

== References ==
<references />

[[Category:Attractions]]
[[Category:Hong Kong Disneyland]]
[[Category:Roller coasters]]
[[Category:Grizzly Gulch]]

Big Grizzly Mountain Runaway Mine Cars - Revision history

Admin: ParksWiki backfill wave 4