Julie Freed couldn’t seem to contain her excitement that people are finally getting to ride Lagoon’s newest roller coaster, Primordial.
“Did you get the dragon or the owl?” Freed, Lagoon’s director of special events and a member of the Farmington amusement park’s founding family, asked a rider Friday afternoon, the first day the coaster was in operation. “Did you do the drop or the slide?”
Freed said Primordial has eight different endings, assigned randomly to each cart, so riders can go again and again and have different experiences each time. That’s just one of the features of the ride, which Lagoon has been developing since 2015.
“We’ve never done anything close to this before,” Freed said of the medieval-themed ride, which combines video screens, 3-D images, and interactive game play with the ups, downs and loops of a standard roller coaster.
The ride is contained within a human-made 70,000-square-foot mountain built at the park’s north end. “Colossus and Jet Star II could both fit inside the mountain,” Freed said, referring to two of Lagoon’s older coasters, “and we would still have room for the merry-go-round.”
The rock-like facade covers some 10,000 pieces of steel, Freed said, adding that all of the structural steel was fabricated in Utah. In all, Utah suppliers, vendors and contractors — 65 companies in all — were responsible for more than 75% of the ride, park officials said.
The ride features nearly 2,000 feet of track, Freed said, on which the carts travel as fast as 40 mph. The ride starts with some loops outside the mountain structure, before the carts go inside the ride. Once inside, riders can use a “blaster,” attached to the safety rigging of their seats, to shoot at various targets on the 3-D video screens. (Glasses are provided as one enters.)
Small screens in the cart show each rider’s score, and the riders can compare scores on the ride’s last screen before disembarking. High scores will be displayed on a “hall of fame” for everyone to see, Freed said.
Primordial’s ride lasts nearly 5 minutes, Freed said — nearly twice as long as Lagoon’s extreme coaster, Cannibal, where a trip clocks in around 2½ minutes. The new ride is also more family-friendly than Cannibal; Primordial allows riders 36 inches tall (accompanied by someone supervising), where Cannibal’s riders must be 48 inches tall or more.
Because the ride is meant for families, Freed said, the game play is friendly. “We didn’t want to shoot the bad guy,” she said. “We wanted to be freeing the good guy.” Sometimes the good guy is an owl, sometimes it’s a dragon.
Freed said she accompanied her father, Lagoon owner David Freed, to a visit to the Canada’s Wonderland amusement park in Ontario, Canada. They rode a coaster there that made her dad say, “I wonder if we could design something like this,” she said.
David Freed died last Christmas Eve, at age 74. Freed dedicated the ride to her father at Friday’s ribbon-cutting.
Primordial is already being talked about in the international coaster community, Julie Freed said. The fall conference of the American Coaster Enthusiasts, a nonprofit club of people who love roller coasters, is scheduled for Farmington and Logan, Sept. 29 to Oct. 1. “I think they’re going to love it,” she said.
Freed said Lagoon had hoped to open Primordial at the start of the season, back in May, but various issues delayed the opening until Friday — just over six weeks before the park ends its season on Oct. 29.
“We’ve been dying to open this ride,” Freed said, adding that waiting for next season was not an option. “There was no way we were going to hold it another year.”
