By now, you’ve probably heard quite a bit about Dollywood – the Pigeon Forge, Tennessee theme park owned by global music superstar Dolly Parton and stylized as a celebration of her Smoky Mountain home. Dollywood has long been a hidden gem for theme park enthusiasts, and its national profile has risen in the last few years in particular thanks to Disney’s era of slashed perks and new upcharges. In fact, Dollywood came in #1 on our list of destination parks perfect for those feeling priced out of Disney World.
Whereas most parks might’ve taken their rise in national attention for granted, Dollywood has spent the last decade building big time. We’re talking about the 2012 debut of a mountaintop B&M wing coaster, a 2014 multi-launch family coaster with fire effects, the 2016 opening of the high octane, top-rated Lightning Rod RMC engineering marvel, and the 2019 unveiling of an entirely new land – the fantastical and playful Wildwood Grove packed with original characters, a suspended family coaster, and a forest’s worth of family flat rides.
Now, Dollywood’s newest addition promises to expand the park’s wildly-growing capacity with Big Bear Mountain – a triple launch family coaster through Wildwood Grove that brings some spectacular new features to the park and to the family coaster category. Today, we’ve collected a list of some of the reasons to love this new family classic! But let’s start at the beginning…
The Legend of Wildwood Grove…
“When I was a little girl, these things here were exactly what I used to dream about,” Dolly said, “All these bears. All these butterflies. All those bees and frogs ’cause we were just part of nature being country kids…!”
And in 2019, we finally got a peek into the wonderland that Dolly and her siblings imagined as they played in the woods around their “Tennessee Mountain Home”. Wildwood Grove was a six-acre, $37 million expansion onto previously un-used land at Dollywood… Finding new space to build in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains isn’t easy. Dollywood is a park wedged between mountains (as evidenced by its hilariously unusual parking lot), so creating Wildwood Grove was a feat in its own right.
And you really can’t argue with the results! Wildwood Grove is a land that families could spend the whole day in. From preschool-ready classics (like the Treetop Tower of observation acorns, the Frogs and Fireflies bouncing spinner, and the Hidden Hollow indoor playground) to more thrilling family fare (including the Giant Tree Swing rocking ship and the Mad Mockingbird flying scooters), this land has had something for everyone.
And until now, it’s all been reigned over by Wildwood Grove’s ultimate thrill, The Dragonflier coaster – a Vekoma Suspended Family Coaster that dives underground, leaping over a pool of fountains.
But that’s all changed with the new addition for 2023…
Big Bear Rises
As legend has it, somewhere deep in Wildwood Grove resides a creature known only as the “Big Bear.” Stories of this major ursa have spread among the people of the Smoky Mountains for generations, and though many have reported sightings, precious little evidence of the Big Bear has ever been found…
Luckily, Wildwood Grove’s resident wildlife expert, Ned Oakley, is on the case. Oakley has transformed the land’s Adventure Outpost into a recruitment center, hoping to bring you along for an off-roading expedition into the wild terrain of the Grove to search out evidence of the Big Bear and prove its existence once and for all!
Which brings us to some of the must-celebrate features for this new family favorite… On the page, we’ll dig into what you’ve got to know about this brand new roller coaster as well as addressing some complaints about it we’ve seen on Facebook…
1. It’s big. Literally.
By the numbers, Big Bear Mountain is a beast. This ride ranks as the longest roller coaster at Dollywood with 3,990 feet of track and an almost unbelievable two minute ride time – and that’s without any lift hills to artificially run out the clock.
Big Bear Mountain quite literally fills the hillsides surrounding Wildwood Grove, dipping, twisting, diving, and careening along the terrain. (Though right now those hillsides are quite bare, it shouldn’t be too many years before trees reclaim the acres cleared for the ride’s expansive construction.)
2. It’s packed with personality
Last year, we spent a whole feature here at Theme Park Tourist exploring what we call the “New Coaster Wars”. While the original Coaster Wars in the ’90s saw parks and ride manufacturers race to build ever-larger, faster, and more intense prototypes, the New Coaster Wars – an exemplified by Busch Gardens’ Pantheon, Islands of Adventure’s VelociCoaster, and even Dollywood’s Lightning Rod – are about custom rides packed with personality.
In other words, it’s not about having the most intense or outrageous or record-breaking ride anymore. Instead, it’s about focusing on what makes your park unique and backwards-engineering rides that make the most of it! For Dollywood, those built-in strengths are the park’s authentically-mountainous terrain, its family appeal, and of course, the stories of Dolly’s own imaginative childhood and Smoky Mountain stories. Both narratively and experientially, those strengths are are full display as guests rocket through a custom, terrain-following coaster serving as a headliner for Wildwood Grove.
3. It’ll be an essential “first big coaster” for generations
On our Facebook, we’ve seen a few oddly vocal coaster enthusiasts who seem determined to turn people against Big Bear Mountain. They say that Dollywood’s new ride (quote) “stinks,” is “very tame,” is “a kiddie coaster,” and even that it’s a bust because it doesn’t feature any “airtime” or “hang time” – apparently insinuating that riders should be dangled upside down on it! Obviously, these few naysayers don’t understand the role that this ride plays in Dollywood, and indeed, for the whole region.
Look no further than the Lost Legend: Big Bad Wolf, formerly at Busch Gardens Williamsburg. No doubt those extreme coaster fans would use the same terms to describe Big Bad Wolf. What they don’t understand is that over its 25 year life, generations of locals experienced Big Bad Wolf as their first “big” coaster; the one that bridged the gap between off-the-shelf kiddie coaster models and the rest of the park’s bigger, more intense lineup. Big Bear Mountain will be that for decades, serving as a new “first big coaster” for countless families – it’s a totally perfect, mid-sized, just-right adventure for families with kids ready to make the jump.
4. It comes with some unexpected technological flourishes…
Back in the ’90s, the picture of a “family coaster” was pretty limited – generally, fairly simple mine trains and the occasional suspended swinging coaster. Today, that genre is exploding. Rides like the Backlot Stunt Coaster, Verbolten, DarKoaster, Slinky Dog Dash, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, and Dollywood’s own Firechaser Express have formed the new 21st century foundation of the genre, adding in once-unthinkable, technological elements like launches, fire effects, projection, switch tracks, drop tracks, backwards motion, swinging cars, and more.
Yep, parks are coming back from the over-intense focus of the ’90s Coaster Wars big time, and Big Bear Mountain sets a new standard. Not only does this totally-unique, custom family coaster include an incredible three launches (up to a top speed of 48 miles per hour), but with synchronized on-ride audio – a feature rarely seen outside of Disney and Universal Parks. In that way, Big Bear Mountain really is cutting edge, perhaps signaling that we might see on-board audio become more accessible for seasonal, regional parks going forward.
5. It makes Dollywood an even stronger regional and national contender
No doubt about it – Dollywood is on the rise. With its second on-site hotel (the Heartsong Lodge) set to open this year, more and more families seem to be selecting Dollywood (and other regional parks) as replacements for increasingly inaccessible trips to Walt Disney World. The park’s explosive growth over the last decade has shown no signs of slowing down, and Big Bear Mountain seems to be the next step in its incredible investment campaign.
Whether you’re looking for cutting edge coasters, live entertainment, home-cooked meals, or a mountain getaway, you’ll find them all at Dollywood. And with Big Bear Mountain serving as a new must-see coaster for up-and-coming thrill-seekers, it looks like Dollywood will be staying on many families’ “to-do lists” for the foreseeable future…
