Expedition Everest-Through 20 Years of my Life

Expedition Everest—Over 20 years in my life

I guess I am feeling nostalgic after Everest turned 20 years old this year. This has been one of my favorite attractions for almost that entire span. I was a very nervous kid, scared of most of the rides at theme parks, I would pass them by while my brother and dad would ride them all. One kid rode Tower of Terror at 5 years old, one couldn’t even ride E.T. at 5 years old. Expedition Everest was one of the first dominoes that fell as I gained more confidence in theme park attractions.

Expedition Everest can be a little intimidating for a kid. It is a tall mountain, and the hill climb that you can see from the ground is a bit scary. My fear got magnified as during one of the days I went, it got stuck in that climbing portion for a significant amount of time as I looked on. Also, the drop can be seen from outside the ride, and I was terrified of drops at that time. Even the Pirates of the Caribbean drop was scary when I first rode it as a kid. Needless to say, I did not ride it on my first few trips of seeing it, I was not one of the lucky ones to ride it with a working yeti.

Middle school peer pressure was finally the thing that pushed me onto this ride. I was I 5^th grade at the time while my brother was on a 7^th grade band field trip that my parents decided to chaperone for. Lucky for me, they didn’t just leave me at home, so I got to go too. Even though I was terrified, I had to play it cool in front of the 7^th graders, so my 11-year-old self decided to get on after years of waiting at the ride exit with my mom.

This was the first domino to fall, as I rode multiple rides for the first time on this trip, including Dinosaur, Tower of Terror, and Rock’n Roller Coaster. My eyes were closed on most of these rides, but no one knew that.

In 8^th grade, I had a math team trip to Disney for the state math team competition. This was one of my favorite trips as a kid, and we decided to ride Expedition Everest 11 times in a row, because we were kids, and Animal Kingdom didn’t have much to do at the time. Some of us got sick at 5 or 6 rides, but most of us stuck through for 11 rides… A feat that I will never try and do today. Around this time is when one of the books in the Kingdom Keepers series came out and used this ride as a climactic moment as the yeti turned into the Disney character Chernabog.

My senior year, we went to Animal Kingdom for a day, and once again, there weren’t many rides at the park. “Single ride Everest” was a good inside joke for weeks after that. We rode it as many times as we could as a single rider. We also tried our best to get our one friend that was very scared to get on it. A very fun ride.

This year, it celebrated 20 years of being open. This ride remains one of the best combinations of thrill and theming that any theme park has ever done. Also, almost 20 years of a broken 30 feet animatronic stuck in the disco yeti form.