1. Jeff Fillmore

    Jeff Fillmore Member

    Saw a post in another forum on River Country- from what I read the plan to 'refurbish' it was scrapped due to lack of interest and some damage by a hurricane a few years back. These are not my pictures but show how it looks today- pretty sad. Click on the slideshow - 60+ pics.

    River Country Gallery
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 11, 2014
  2. gary

    gary Member

    i don't think it was so much lack of interest, in my experience it always had a pretty good crowd in the warmer months, i always felt it was a nice bonus to staying in the campground. i think what sealed it's fate were
    1. not enough modern, fast big slides and rides, kids, esp teenagers want the latest,biggest baddest of whatever
    2. cost to upgrade filtration system, the water was taken right from bay lake, a no-no today, and would need almost complete re-plumbing job to bring up to modern water park standards
    i wonder though if it might eventually make a comeback, nothing has been torn down, and there are persistent rumors that disney feels the need to make a 3rd water park, especially since during peak summer times blizzard and typhoon can reach max capacity by 1100 many days
    it's been at least 8 years since bb opened, and the world has added almost 10,000 plus beds since then,
    so here's to ahoping it makes a comeback
    gary
     
  3. Tim

    Tim Administrator Staff Member

    i had never been to RC before they closed it and, well, it looks like it's going to need a LOT of work if they ever plan on salvaging it. it's a shame, it looks like it had a very tom sawyer-esque quality about it.
     
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  4. Roger

    Roger Member Staff Member

    Odd. I got a survey about my stay. One of the questions they specifically asked was about going to the water parks.
     
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  5. Jeff Fillmore

    Jeff Fillmore Member

    When I said 'lack of interest' I was thinking the same thing- lack of patrons due to bigger/newer water parks. I would love to see it come back- I never went there but can always remember as a kid seeing the commercials on the in-room disney channel and begging my parents to let us go there- it just never happened. :(
     
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  6. Dan

    Dan Member

    I don't think I ever went there either.. I went to one of the other water parks once.
    I always wanted to go to River Country though.. I like the theme they had going for it. Like Tim said, the Tom Sawyer quality. I have an inexplicable draw to that sort of thing.. like I want to break into stories about the times when I was younger, when I used to head out to the "old swimming hole".. except there was no old swimming hole for me. I grew up in the suburbs, going to the usual suburban pools. Well.. in Colorado it was a reservoir, a bit more spectacular, and in Illinois we have an old rock quarry that's been converted into a pool, also very impressive.. but the point is the whole idea of River Country gives me a sort of feeling of false nostalgia. A rememberence of times that never were.

    I can see the idea that it wouldn't compete with the newer water parks with the big water slides, or that the cost to get it working wouldn't be worth the lower profile it'd have to take.. if so, so be it, there are other things that rate higher on my priorities, like lynching the people who designed the remade Journey into Imagination... smacking the person who first said "why don't we redesign Alien Encounter to make it more kiddie friendly"..

    But for what it's worth, a neat series of pictures. Even if all the water was filled with algae, it was still a view of something I've never seen before, and being able to see a Disney designed attraction that's been abandoned to the elements is interesting. I'm particularly curious about the water slides that empty into what looks like grass. What's going on there? Were the water slides emptying into a body of water with a sand base that dried up?
    Believe it or not I smiled while looking through the pictures. It's sad to see it in that state.. but at the same time there's so much of the original design that appears to be intact. Perhaps it's an illusion, but it looks like it wouldn't take too much to bring it right back. I can at least have my fantasy that maybe some time they'll invest a little bit of money into it and bring it back as a low key water park for people who aren't looking for water based thrill rides.
     
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  7. Jeff Fillmore

    Jeff Fillmore Member

    I agree it would be nice if they could bring it back- mabey for the people who stay at Folt Wilderness campground as I think it is located right there. Hopefully the imagineers will come up with some way to revitalize it. I have no idea on the slides in the grass- The pictures I found most interesting were the few you could see other Disney buildings off in the background.
     
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  8. zackiedawg

    zackiedawg Member Staff Member

    That's correct! There were shallow kid slides that ended in a shallow section of the lagoon. Much of River Country was natural sandy bottom - it was an extension off of the lake. The primary grounds of the water park were based around the main lagoon, with some separate chlorinated pool sections off to the side. I'm not quite sure from that picture if those are the kiddie slides, or if those are the tops of the pool sides or other slides dismounted and sitting on the ground. But there were slides that ended in the lagoon, both for older kids and younger ones.

    The main lagoon section had two floating pontoon platforms for jumping off, a zip-line ride with the t-bar handle, two curvy slides that ended in the lagoon, an innertube river ride which was a slow meander ending in a drop at the end, and some kiddie-based slides and in-water rides. The deeper section was the area nearest the lake, where you could swim right along the separating barrier between the lake and River Country. In the shallow section, there were little spring-mounted sit-on rides, and little pilings to sit on or jump off of. Fish could swim through the gate, at least the smaller ones, so they would occasionally be swimming about. In the pool section, there were two high-drop slides that had a 5-7 foot drop off into the pool. And I seem to remember a section with some waterguns.

    I loved it there. I spend many of my days in River Country as a child. we often stayed at the Fort Wilderness campgrounds, and loved to take the break from the parks to just swim around and get sunburned. In the later years of going there, they had started to have a series of closures on hotter days due to bacteria or algae levels (since it uses the same water as the lake) - I'm absolutely sure that the bacteria levels were no different than any previous hot summers, but this was around the time when people started paying more attention to those things, and legal concerns forced Disney to not take the chance of being sued by a family of a sick child who swallowed some water.

    I was losing my interests in water parks into my late teens, and from 1985-1990, I never went. Just before it closed in the early 90s, I had gone again a few times while staying in Ft. Wilderness - not so much for the rides as for the memories of playing around in the lake. Some of the rides were closed, and there were rumours they might close. Sure enough, closure soon followed, but the facilities remained - which left some hope it might get refurbished a bit and reopen. Unfortunately, the 2004 hurricanes pounded the area, and further damaged the infrastructure - also putting a nail in the coffin for any chance of refurbishing and reopening Discovery Island (another place I used to go to alot!).

    Thanks for the gallery and a look around in River Country today! I haven't really seen much of it except when passing by in the Fort Wilderness boat on the way to Magic Kingdom...but it looks pretty grown over and forgotten. It's kind of sad that some of the classic Disney like this is being lost - a time when Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn influenced watering holes were still appreciated! Maybe someday, this will be so quaint and historical that there will be a retro-trend to bring it back. As much as I am an uber-Disney fan, and spending more than 25 days a year at the parks, it is somewhat telling that River Country is the last Disney waterpark I've been to. I never had any desire to go to Typhoon Lagoon or Blizzard Beach - as fun as they look and as nice as they are for out-of-town visitors. Living in Florida, the climate is something I'm used to, and pools and oceans are something we enjoy 9 months a year. But even living near the beach and having a pool at home, we always made a visit to River Country - it was the antique feel, the quaint history, and the feel that you were living back in time, that made it worth visiting!
     
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  9. Tim

    Tim Administrator Staff Member

    well put, justin.
     
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  10. zackiedawg

    zackiedawg Member Staff Member

    Well, I dug up one pic from the pool area at River Country (couldn't find one from the Swimmin' hole yet...still have alot of old pics to go through). This pool had several slides that emptied into it, and waterfalls you could go under (and people could walk through a cave on land and go under the waterfall too). The low slides were for all ages, and then they had to high slides that dropped off 10-feet above the pool for a nice free fall at the end. Here is a shot looking towards the waterfall & caves, and one of the lower slides:

    [​IMG]

    My mom's the woman standing back by the waterfall in this shot.
     
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  11. Jeff Fillmore

    Jeff Fillmore Member

    That looks almost like the old Poly pool- I remember as a kid going thru the waterfall to get up the slide. :)
     
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  12. modemmike

    modemmike Member

    I think read or heard somewhere once that River Country was the first water park. Got any now pics of Discovery Island (now that would be a challenge! ;D)
     
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  13. zackiedawg

    zackiedawg Member Staff Member

    Well I do have these two pics from Discovery Island, circa 1980:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    I wish they would open it up again - quite a wildlife refuge in there for birds! But it got too trashed in the hurricanes, and has suffered years of no cleaning and thousands of birds relieving themselves there...even the employees don't want to go near it now!
     
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  14. WDWFigment

    WDWFigment Member

    Lack of interest wasn't so much the reason (even with BB and TL, it always drew crowds if only because the other two would often be at capacity by noon), but the cost of upgrading the filtration system and capacity. For how much it would cost to upgrade the filtration system and increase capacity, they might as well (from a cost perspective) build a new water park in a better location. There have been blue sky plans for a Pirates themed water park, but for some reason, those have never come to fruition. The money is there to be made, so it only seems like a matter of time before we see a new park. It won't be a refurbished River Country, sadly.
     
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