For most of Disney Parks history, some of the greatest thrills, most breathtaking attractions, and most memorable E-Ticket anchors have had one thing in common: they’ve been built around a literal mountain range of Disney-designed peaks. From the snowcapped cols of the Himalayas to the sun-baked, sunset-hued cathetrals of the Southwest, these “peaks” of Imagineering are often rides that carry between generations, delighting young and old and – for many – serving as the first major “thrills” of a lifetime.
In this special countdown, we’ll conquer the 12 headlining Disney Parks attractions built around “mountains” to see which peaks truly come out on top. Along the way, count how many of these spectacular summits from around the globe you’ve encountered. Then, be sure to use the comments to share your thoughts on Disney’s decades-long connection to “mountains,” and how these thrills shape the parks we know and love, and are shaped by the ebb and flow of the industry, technology, and storytelling.
12. Matterhorn Bobsleds
Image: Disney
Location: Disneyland Park (1959)
Mountain: Matterhorn
It’s only fitting – for a number of reasons – that any definitive countdown of Disney Mountain E-Tickets begins with the first. Matterhorn Bobsleds opened at Disneyland in 1959 as part of a sweeping expansion of Tomorrowland overseen by Walt himself. The “E-Ticket” was literally invented for Matterhorn Bobsleds (plus the Monorail and Submarine Voyage, which opened the same day), meaning it required the most expensive and elite ride ticket to summit the snow-capped peak.
Groundbreaking in its day, Matterhorn wasn’t just the first roller coaster at a Disney Park, it was also the first modern steel roller coaster ever by today’s standards, and with a cutting edge computer system that allowed more than one train to be safely traveling the course at once.
Image: Disney
In the 1970s, the ride was “moved” (on the map, at least) from Tomorrowland to Fantasyland, and a 1978 renovation took the formerly hollow mountain and filled it with icy caverns, crystal grottos, and a few hair-raising encounters with the Abominable Snowman. In 2015, a renovation of the 55-year-old mountain saw its effects updated for the 21st century (to mixed reviews) and introduced a new generation of bobsled train that, many fans argue, left the ride worse for the wear, especially being so primitive by most riders’ modern standards anyway. Still, Matterhorn is a beloved piece of Disney history, a Disneyland exclusive, and the only Disney “mountain” Walt himself ever saw completed.
11. Seven Dwarfs Mine Train
Image: Disney
Location: Magic Kingdom (2014) and Shanghai Disneyland (2016)
Mountain: N/A
It may be more fair to call the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train a grassy hill rather than a full-fledged mountain, but the ride is perfectly positioned as a family-friendly practice run en route to Disney’s more looming peaks.
When Disney announced plans for a New Fantasyland focused almost entirely on princess meet-and-greets, fans fought back, insisting that if this were Disney’s answer to the still-new Wizarding World of Harry Potter up the road, they’d need to try harder.
Image: Disney
Say what you will, but designers did, returning to the drawing board and countering with Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, a swinging, compact family coaster with a charming dark ride scene in the middle.
Was the ride’s opening worth the closure of Magic Kingdom’s opening day Lost Legend: Snow White’s Scary Adventures? We’ll leave that to you to decide. Perhaps no ride could live up to the multi-hour waits the Mine Train has earned in its first years, but in and of itself, it’s a clever C-Ticket for all members of the family to enjoy together – a perfect step between the Barnstormer and Big Thunder Mountain, and a clever example of modern Imagineering.
10. Grizzly River Run
Image: Disney
Location: Disney California Adventure (2001)
Mountain: Grizzly Peak
There’s nothing particularly bad about California Adventure’s Grizzly River Run – one of the few rides to open with the park in 2001. In fact, we even argued in our in depth Disaster File: Disney’s California Adventure that the ride (and particularly the land it was positioned in) were standouts in the otherwise forgettable park.
As part of the park’s grand re-opening in 2012, the ride’s “extreme sports” styling was masked with a more reverent, historical National Parks theme that suits it well. On-board, riders raft through dense evergreen forests, splash through caverns eroded through the towering Grizzly Peak, teeter along the edge of truly breathtaking, thundering waterfalls, and sail through misty, lantern-lit geyser fields.
Image: Disney
The long and short of it is that Grizzly River Run is a nicely-paced, thrilling, scenic trip through some beautifully-designed natural environments.
What it’s missing? The “Disney” touch. Along its winding course, what you won’t see is any type of storyline, any noteworthy scenes, or any wildlife (either authentic or animatronic). Grizzly River Run seems the perfect place for a few Audio-Animatronic creatures, even if they’re as simple as the kind that inhabit Big Thunder Mountain. Given that insiders say Grizzly Peak almost housed a Country Bear Theatre, it would at least make sense to place a few of Disney’s fabled Country Bears along the course.
9. Roaring Rapids
Image: Disney
Location: Shanghai Disneyland (2015)
Mountain: Mount Apu Taku
When we took our In-Depth: Shanghai Disneyland walkthrough, we saw first-hand how Imagineers responsible for the Chinese park tossed out the “Disneyland” rule book and started from scratch. This is the perfect example. Gone is Adventureland (with its mish-mashed Southest Asian, Polynesian, and African settings and styles) replaced with a land as deeply detailed and habitable as Cars Land, but populated by an elaborate original story.
Adventure Isle is set in the 1930s on a lost tropical island – home to the native Arbori people. The newly-arrived League of Adventurers has set up base camp, learning from and working alongside the Arbori to uncover the mystical wonders of this unusual place.
One puzzle that the Adventurers League is eager to solve is the unknown source of the deep, otherworldly roaring eminated from behind Mount Apu Taku’s waterfall. The Arbori speak of a great river guardian whose nest is deep inside, and as new recruits to the League, we’re set off to find out more. Of course, the legends are true, and the ride’s headlining moment is a fleeting face-to-maw encounter with the dreaded Q’araq, a creature who earned high praise (and a point-of-view video) in our Countdown of the Best Animatronics on Earth, if only for sheer size alone.
Image: Disney
Though it’s hard to imagine, Roaring Rapids is actually an almost-identical twin of Disney California Adventure’s Grizzly River Run, and while its signature animatronic encounter is breathtaking, it suffers from the same issue as Grizzly Peak’s ride… Aside from Q’araq, Roaring Rapids feels like a mostly-vacant ride through red-rock river channels. Why Disney couldn’t have populated the entire course with gigantic Adventure Isle creatures (both friendly and fearsome), we may never know. The result is that a ride many expected to be among the park’s signature experiences is really more of an aside, proving Disney still hasn’t quite mastered how a spinning, fast-paced raft ride can coexist with their storytelling and scenic design speciality.
8. Big Grizzly Mountain Runaway Mine Cars
Image: Disney
Location: Hong Kong Disneyland (2012)
Mountain: Big Grizzly Mountain
The other grizzly-shaped mountain in Disney’s mountainous portfolio belongs at Hong Kong Disneyland. The tiny, infamously underbuilt park opened in 2005 (the culmination of a dark period in Disney Parks history) lacking many of the rides most fans would call “essentials.” No Pirates, no Haunted Mansion, no “small world,” no Peter Pan’s Flight, and no Big Thunder Mountain to name just a few. Instead, the puny park had only four lands: Main Street, Adventureland, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland. Period.
In 2009, Disney issued a mea culpa and announced a massive expansion, adding three new lands in an unprecedented outer loop outside of the park’s Railroad, including Toy Story Land and the remarkable Mystic Point (home to the park’s new-age version of a haunted house and subject of an in-depth ride-through feature, Modern Marvels: Mystic Manor). The third land, Grizzly Gulch, is sort of like a new-age Frontierland sapping a bit of the raw Americana in favor of the whimsy and fantasy of the Old West.
Image: Disney
Grizzly Gulch’s headliner is its own bear-shaped mountain (albeit, a slightly more abstract one than California’s, given the need to look like desert rock) with its Runaway Mine Cars roller coaster perhaps best understood as “what Big Thunder Mountain would be like if it were developed after Expedition Everest.” The ride launches guests forwards and backwards, passing through the mountain’s mining innards and through a few scenes populated by animatronic bears, special effects, and explosions.
7. Big Thunder Mountain Railroad
Image: Disney
Location: Disneyland (1979), Magic Kingdom (1980), Tokyo Disneyland (1987), Disneyland Paris (1992)
Mountain: Big Thunder Mountain
Big Thunder Mountain is a landmark for the part it plays in so many stories in Disney Parks history. Maybe that’s because it’s a product of the ’70s – a time of unbelievable change at Disney Parks. Still reeling from Walt’s death, there was great trepidation through the ’70s about how – or even if – Walt Disney Productions and its theme parks would survive. The 1960s had been an era of expensive, highly-themed dark rides (like Pirates and Haunted Mansion), and new leadership wasn’t sure that such elaborate, ambitious projects should take place anymore. That’s why Magic Kingdom never got its planned headliner – a Western cousin of Pirates we studied in-depth in its own feature, Possibilityland: Western River Expedition.
Image: Disney
Instead, executives opted for something “cheap and cheerful,” eager to bolster the parks without too much investment… or risk. Big Thunder Mountain was seen as a much safer (and much less costly) way to infuse thrills into Disney Parks while also bolstering Frontierland, which was feeling stale in an era where Americans’ interest in the Old West was waning.
Big Thunder Mountain Railroad turned the West wild, sending guests racing through the sunset-hued rockwork of the American Southwest, through collapsing tunnels, among gold mines, and past desert animals. But more than a standalone adventure, it was also meant to be an ambassador. The Disneyland version – intentionally stylized differently than the rest – was originally meant to be the mere prologue to an entire new themed area – a Possibilityland: Discovery Bay – that would’ve been a seaside, steampunk San Franscisco of inventions, zephyrs, submarines, and more.
Image: Disney
While that extension of Big Thunder Mountain’s story never came to be, its most recent installation at Disneyland Paris also proved to be its most ambitious. Given that Paris’ version was the only Big Thunder Mountain to be master-planned and built into the park for opening, it was given a prominent position in the center of the Rivers of the Far West (where American fans would expect Tom Sawyer Island) and a prominent position in the land’s story, creating a massive, overarching continuity that ties the ride directly to the park’s haunted house, a Modern Marvel: Phantom Manor.
Phew! As simple as it may seem by today’s standards, Big Thunder Mountain was a game-changer whose position in Disney Parks history acts as the pivot point for many other projects. And at the end of the day, it simply feels like Big Thunder Mountain has elevated through generations to become a Disney classic.
6. Splash Mountain
Image: Disney
Location: Disneyland (1989), Tokyo Disneyland (1992), and Magic Kingdom (1992)
Mountain: Chickapin Hill
Just as the ’70s were marked by budget-conscious steel coasters, the ’80s were a time of cinematic splendor at the hands of new CEO Michael Eisner. As the story goes, early on in his tenure, Eisner was desperate to take Disney Parks to the next level, and make them current, interesting, relevant, thrilling places where pre-teens and teenagers would want to go.
To help, he brought his young son Breck along on a visit to Disney Imagineering headquarters in Glendale to see what projects they had in the pipeline. And while Imagineers gathered around models of rides that former executives had axed and pleaded with Eisner to green-light Discovery Bay, his son wandered off and found the model of Zip-a-Dee River Run, a thrilling flume ride through Disney’s The Song of the South. (Which, interestingly, made the flume a $75 million ride based on a film that’s never been released on home video in the US.)
Image: Disney
Breck was in awe of the idea and allegedly told his dad, “I’d want to ride this one.” Convinced that the flume would be a step in his mission toward making Disney Parks thrilling, cinematic, cool places to be, Eisner allegedly green-lit the project on the spot, requiring only that it cross-promote Disney’s 1984 fantasy rom-com, Splash. (And since Disney designers refused to put an animatronic Madison the mermaid among its show scenes, he’d have to do with simply calling the ride Splash Mountain.)
At Disneyland, the ride was built on a narrow strip of land in the Bear Country area and was populated by 103 Audio-Animatronics (most salvaged from the America Sings! rotating theater show in Tomorrowland, which had replaced the Modern Marvel: Carousel of Progress). The ride was then opened at Tokyo Disneyland in 1992 (in perhaps its most elaborate and built-out form), and opened at Magic Kingdom the day after, each with 63 Audio Animatronics from scratch.
Image: Disney
The ride follows the almost-indiscernible story of the clever Br’er Rabbit, who sets off from his home in the prickly Briar Patch at the base of Chickapin Hill looking for greener pastures… only to find himself on the menu of the always-sinister Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear. It’s the Rabbit’s quick thinking and a little reverse psychology when cornered (“Oh, no, Mr. Fox! Whatever you do, don’t throw me into that there Briar Patch!”) that saves the day, sending us over the hill and back home for a rousing riverboat finale. “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-aye, home sweet home is the lesson today!”
5. Radiator Springs Racers
Image: Disney / Pixar
Location: Disney California Adventure (2012)
Mountain: Cadillac Range
When it became clear to Disney executives that the infamous second gate at Disneyland was never going to fix itself, they launched an unprecedented effort to fix the park at its foundation. Disney California Adventure underwent a 5-year reconstruction effort costing more than a billion dollars (when the original park itself had only been $600 million), recasting each of its themed lands as historic, reverent, thoughtful Californian locales rather than the modern spoofs of California they had been.
Image: Disney / Pixar
But the undisputed highlight of the transformation was Cars Land, a bolt-for-bolt recreation of the sleepy town of Radiator Springs from the Disney-Pixar film Cars. The very idea of Radiator Springs (definitely not a California town) seemed at odds with the new, rooted, storied Californian park, but there’s no denying that Cars Land changed the game at the Disneyland Resort and beyond.
Image: Disney
Disney’s first attempt at an entire, immersive, to-scale themed land based on a single intellectual property, the land is breathtaking in scope, thanks to the unimaginable Cadillac Range that stretches across the horizon – so grand, it ranked among our must-see Seven “Natural” Wonders of the Theme Park World. The Cadillac Rang is absolutely iconic, with its most distant peaks shaped after the tail lights of Cadillac models from 1957, ’58, ’59, ’60, ’61, and ’62, in order, while somehow looking convincingly possible.
Like a real natural wonder, the Cadillac Range simply must be seen to be believed, as the all-encompassing scale of this vast mountain range fills the eye, creating a backdrop to the southeastern corner of the park.
Image: Disney
The attraction that carries guests up to, around, and through that remarkable range also happens to be one of the most spectacular Disney rides out there. A true Modern Marvel: Radiator Springs Racers is an astounding dark ride populated by amazing Audio-Animatronics, centered around the technology that debuted alongside a Lost Legend: TEST TRACK. The weaving, racing dark ride is a delight. A Disney California Adventure exclusive, the land and its headlining attraction should rank high on most Disney Parks fans’ bucket lists as a must-see experience.
4. Space Mountain
Image: Disney
Location: Magic Kingdom (1975), Disneyland (1977), Tokyo Disneyland (1983), Disneyland Paris (1995), Hong Kong Disneyland (2005)
Walt himself first began toying with the concept of a steel coaster through space to act as the headliner of the New Tomorrowland that opened in Disneyland in 1967. However, it wasn’t until Magic Kingdom proved unexpectedly popular with teens that Disney moved forward with the plan.
Image: Disney
Florida ride is actually modeled closely after the Matterhorn Bobsleds, with two mirror-imaged roller coaster tracks sharing the darkened, star-projected interior of the mysterious Space Age peak.
When it was decided that Disneyland should have its own Space Mountain, the ride was reconfigured into a single-track roller coaster, which was then duplicated in Tokyo and Hong Kong in turn. Disneyland’s ride was eventually rebuilt for the park’s 50th Anniversary in 2005, adding new special effects, projection potential, and synchronized, on-board audio.
Image: Disney
Since Disneyland Paris didn’t have a Tomorrowland at all (replacing it with the retro-futuristic, European, literary, golden Discoveryland inspired by Jules Verne), the 1995 ride that opened there was the one-of-a-kind Lost Legend: Space Mountain – De le Terre à la Lune, a distinctly fantasy-infused adventure through the stars. In France, the ride features inversions and a breathtaking launch into the peak, though it – and the Hong Kong version of the mountain – is currently hosting a Star Wars overlay that’s especially anachronistic inside of its gilded, steampunk, fantasy shell.
(When Shanghai Disneyland opened with a very new kind of Tomorrowland, a Chinese-government-enforced moratorium on “Disney classics” found at other resorts meant Space Mountain was axed from the line-up. It was replaced with another spectacular subject of our series, Modern Marvels: TRON Lightcycle Power Run, filling Space Mountain’s space literally and figuratively in the land.)
Space Mountain is so legendary, we explored the making-of and launching-of the interstellar adventure in its own feature, Modern Marvels: Space Mountain – a behind-the-scenes look just for Imagineering fans.
3. Expedition Everest
Image: Disney
Location: Disney’s Animal Kingdom (2006)
Mountain: The Forbidden Mountain
When Disney’s Animal Kingdom opened in 1998, it was perhaps the most ambitious Disney Park to date, featuring remarkably life-like lands: overgrown jungles, craftsman villages, lived-in African towns, collapsing Asian ruins… Packed with naturalistic animal enclosures and encounters, details that would take a century to absorb, and boundless pathways through uncharted regions… There was only one thing the park didn’t have: rides. Excluding the two transportation rides, the park had only two: the headlining Kilimanjaro Safaris, and the terrifying Countdown to Extinction.
Though Disney did have plans to open a legendary land of “imagined” creatures like dragons, unicorns, and sea monsters, designers responsible for the fan-favorite Beastly Kingdom were burned by Michael Eisner’s decision to scortch their project and allegedly took their business elsewhere… namely, right up the road to Universal where the land was adapted into a Lost Legend: The Lost Continent. Eventually, Disney did get their “imagined” creature with the introduction of Expedition Everest in 2006…
Image: Disney
A “Spiritual Sequel” to the Matterhorn Bobsleds, Expedition Everest is a 21st century thrill the way only Disney could do – a haunting, spiritual build-up in one of the most detailed queues ever created, leading to a forward-backward roller coaster race through the Forbidden Mountain pass – the snow-entombed home to the Himalayas’ legendary and monstrous guardian, the Yeti… The ride is so spectacular and so packed with detail, it earned it own in-depth entry in our celebratory series, Modern Marvels: Expedition Everest.
2. Journey to the Center of the Earth
Image: Disney
Location: Tokyo DisneySea (2001)
Mountain: Mount Prometheus
When Tokyo DisneySea opened in 2001 (the same year as Disney’s California Adventure), it instantly became a shining beacon of what Disney can do. The nautical park – set against the real Tokyo Bay – is an absolute wonder; an icon of the “park as the E-Ticket” philosophy; the kind of theme park you could spend a day in, ride nothing, and still feel content. Breathtaking in scale, the magnificent park is simply a Mecca for Disney Parks fans (and indeed, themed entertainment design fans) from around the globe, earning top billing on most fans’ bucket lists.
The park’s icon is the towering, 200-foot tall Mount Prometheus, but the fire-belching mountain is more than meets the eye… The collapsed caldera of the volcano is in fact Mysterious Island, the secret hideaway of Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo. And indeed, among the oxidized catwalks encircling the geothermal water of the caldera, you’ll find the entrance to Tokyo’s one-of-a-kind version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But the real E-Ticket is buried inside Mount Prometheus itself – a staggering dark ride based on another Verne classic, Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Image: Disney
The ride – which re-uses the TEST TRACK technology once more – whisks guests deeper and deeper into the planet’s crust, exploring scenes from the novel like endless glowing crystal caverns, underground forests of bioluminscent life, and vast subterranean oceans alight with their own storms. For most fans, though, the highlight of Journey is its finale when, diverted down a previously-unexplored lava tube – the ride comes face-to-face with enormous, dripping, glowing eggs… and the creature that laid them. The face-to-jaws encounter with a creature that tops our Countdown of the Best Animatronics on Earth is so spectacular, it stands among the greatest moments on any Disney Parks dark ride. Then, the ride accelerates to its top speed, literally racing up and bursting out of Mount Prometheus for a photo-finish.
The entire experience is enough to earn the ride its own in-depth feature, Modern Marvels: Journey to the Center of the Earth that’s a must-read for Disney Parks fans.
1. AVATAR Flight of Passage
Image: Disney / Lightstorm Entertainment
Location: Disney’s Animal Kingdom (2017)
Mountain: Valley of Mo’ara
While you might not consider AVATAR Flight of Passage a “mountain” ride in the traditional sense, that would be fine… because these are no traditional mountains… They float, after all. While fans vehemently and vocally objected to the 2009 film AVATAR as a candidate for permanent inclusion in its own full Disney Parks land, the 2017 opening of Pandora – The World of AVATAR seemed to assure fans that the land would work at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, even if it was in spite of the intellectual property and not because of it.
Smartly, designers severed the land from the film, outright skipping the action film’s militaristic human-led assault on the planet (in search of Unobtanium) and instead set the land forward in time to the moon of Pandora long after humans’ attempts to mine Pandora out of existence have been thwarted. In the land, guests play the role of thoughtful eco-tourists, visiting the verdant moon to gaze in awe at its flora and fauna, collectively rolling our eyes at some distant, anonymous ancestors who thought they ought to strip it for profit.
Image: Behind the Thrills
That’s why we’re invited into an old military base (cleverly being consumed by the planet’s alien foliage) to participate in the time-honored, coming-of-age tradition of the native Na’vi people: a ride on the back of a Mountain Banshee.
The brilliance of the concept is a thousand-fold, but there are a few things worth celebrating: first of all, our physical bodies will remain inside the military base, with our mind simply being linked to an “avatar” doing the riding. That explains the industrial set-up, our mounting of an obviously-mechanical device, and the necessary 3-D glasses.
Image: Disney / Lightstorm Entertainment
But once the real world falls away, Flight of Passage becomes – to not say too much of the experience that many have yet to see firsthand – one of the most joyful, surprising, and moving experiences Disney has ever Imagineered. Elevated instantly among the ranks Modern Marvels: The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, Mystic Manor, The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man, Indiana Jones Adventure, or TRON Lightcycle Power Run, the ride is a perfect, inimitable blend of technology, fun, story, and heart.
Is AVATAR Flight of Passage the best theme park ride on Earth? For some people, it may be. Could some of our infatuation be a result of its “new car smell?” Perhaps. But it’s fair to imagine that – among the literal mountain range Disney’s built across the planet, the floating mountains of Mo’ara house the most striking E-Ticket housed in a Disney peak in decades, and if this countdown tells you anything, it should be that that is truly saying something.
While these phenomenal starring mountains may forever be tied to Disney Parks, did you know that there’s a full range of peaks that never came to be? Some of Disney’s most stunning E-Ticket “mountains” were cancelled before they were built, and we dive into their stories in Possibilityland: 10 Never-Built Disney Mountains that’s a great next place to visit. Make the jump and check it out.
Taking a look at our countdown of the best Disney “mountain” E-Tickets, do you agree with our list? Did we get this list entirely backwards, or worse? Which Disney “mountains” belong in last and first place? Share your ideas and thoughts in the comments below!
