North America 06/25 – Lake Compounce + Dorney Park

There was one silver lining to Quantum Accelerator’s fake opening date forcing us to stay in the area longer than necessary. Over the past few days we’d been religiously checking good old queue-times.com for a number of reasons, not least

Boulder Smash was back.

Day 6 – Lake Compounce (again)

Making use of our sweet, sweet preferred parking we hit the park at opening and headed straight to redemption town.

Sure enough, a station wait invited us aboard the front car of #1 Boulder Dash and we were soon on our way up the intimidating lift hill, surrounded by forest, no idea what was to come. I’d managed to avoid spoilers for this long.

Turns out it’s a simple but interesting layout. Swooping turn drop, a very long straight filled with stuff, swooping turn drop, a long straight filled with stuff. Brakes. This didn’t quite tie up with my expectations of it being anything like crazy, wild or out there. Rather than the terrain beast it could have been in my head, and some of the fleeting glimpses you get of it offride, it’s just a simple concept, done well.

The first ‘straight’ bit is actually full of slight corners, snaking along the hillside with a bunch of moderate hills and airtime, and a few laterals for good measure.
The final straight is all hills of varying sizes. Some of them land really well and some of them don’t. There’s titan track from a re-work in a few bits and this seems to have helped it along, notably smoothing out the base of the first drop and providing a very respectably floaty hill towards the end.

One of the most impressive things about Boulder Dash is the way it just kinda chugs through the whole layout at a decent pace. You lose a sense of scale and height amonst the foliage but the momentum built out of the understated two big drops carry it through tons of elements without ever noticeably losing speed, nor ever feeling overly fast. It just goes.

General consensus had told us to stick to the front of the train for the best experience, and we did for the remaining morning laps we could grab before the queue built too badly for the single train operation. Perhaps it is more wild at the back, but I think that’s just due to exacerbated roughness rather than design. Up front is a perfectly fun time if you can avoid the bugs. Recommend sunglasses on, enjoying.

Overall very happy to add the name to my list, Boulder Dash is of course a legend and deservedly so. It wasn’t my absolute favourite CCI but it’s up there, and I have to assume stands as a great inspiration to some of the more modern greats in wood coaster design. Would love to try it at night one day.

But we had places to be, the last minute reshuffling of parks couldn’t allow for us to be anything but efficient or something would lose out on this trip. Nickelodeon Universe had been on the cards for about the tenth time in these trips but their website clearly stated both Sandy and Takabisha weren’t available so it just didn’t seem worth the trek, again.

Instead, a simple 4 hour drive landed us at old mate

Dorney Park

For all the bad rep this place gets or used to get, including from myself with the more tongue in cheek mockery, we had a damn good time on our revisit to Dorney Park. Be that just an effect of some of the worst visits imaginable in the lead up, 2019 Skyrush man was right, it was kicking multiple asses.

We of course started at the new boy, god damn I-ron Menace.

It’s not very good, but it’s not that bad either. Same old big drop, same old elements, slightly above average pace. With modern B&M seemingly in this rut of producing poorly tracked, 300ft, 30 million dollar coasters, #2 Iron Menace rode fine, if unremarkable.

And that sums up the entire attraction really. They’ve tried for a bit of theming here and there, but not really. They’ve tried to incorporate the stupid Impulse into the same area and theme, but not really. You have to go out of your way to see this particular bit, and it’s behind a toilet. The little fiery pit to hell they put under the base of the drop looks absolutely comical in size, design and placement. It really could have used something more for that intimidation factor and it seems like simply no one cares about these dive machines any more. The point of the vertical drop has been lost along the way.

And then there’s just nothing else to give you that story. Which could have been Dr. D levels of obnoxious, sure, but we walked on it, rode it, walked off it, and felt no particular desire to do so again. +1.

Instead we headed over to Steel Force and experienced a real rollercoaster.

I’d completely forgotten how ridiculously good these things can be, in the haze of riding all of them in one stupid trip several years ago. The ’90s weren’t messing around and 2025 is a joke. Steel Force was flawless.

Beautifully smooth, powerful airtime, intense speed, a wild turnaround, very long satisfying ride experience and a train and restraint system that lets it all just feel that 20% more alive. Most importantly, a sense of pure joyous fun. An absolute masterclass and one of the highlights of the trip.

Some may say you should be riding cloned Arrow loopers (trash like Steamin’ Demon) while you still can, cos they’re a dying breed.
No. Ride Morgan hypers while you still can. Total treasures.
Except Steel Eel.


Anyway, there was still another +1 to get after our previously failed completion of the park. The poxy wild mouse with an ever disproportionate queue time.

Queued a disproportionate amount of time given everything that had just happened only to sit in the car, get despatched into some form of station brake skip and then be kicked off because the console was throwing up a fault. So close.

So we went to ride Hydra the Revenge while they worked on that. Another walk on.

It’s good. Perhaps not quite as good as my memory served, but still massively appreciate the out of the box layout on offer. What with the Steel Force turnaround and couple of bits here, Dorney on it’s slight hill has an underrated terrain game. Oh, and interaction game. I forgot the best part about Steel Force, we had the perfect race alongside Thunderbolt, it was magical, like being at Liseberg all over again.

Miraculously they fixed their fairground ride without much delay and we bagged the #3 Wild Mouse. Park complete.

There was then time for one more ride before we had to leave for the night

I had clocked Demon Drop as actually being open for once and wanted to add it to the Intamin drop tower collection, so we did. These are technological treasures and always ones to behold. Terrifying and unhinged is another way to put them and for that reason I love ’em.

I stand by my thoughts from 3 years ago, perhaps with even more conviction. On paper this park looks like it sucks on an American scale because it lacks a destination coaster or hard hitter. The reality for a foreign visitor however is that most of us would kill for a Dorney park of our own. Maybe that’s not possible because the nature of it being overshadowed by giants grants it that freedom to have a solid, well-rounded collection of walk-on major coasters in the middle of summer, but it’s everything I wish Thorpe was right now.

All in all a successful day. Can we make it two in a row?