"Dan" said:
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?
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!
