April 7 - Expedition Everest

On this day, in 2006, guests in Disney's Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World officially felt the first breaths of Yeti's wrath on Expedition Everest. Everest is the 18th mountain themed attraction to appear in a Disney theme park (the first being the Matterhorn Bobsleds in Disneyland). In 2011, the ride had the dubious distinction of being listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most expensive roller coaster ever built, coming in at over $100 million. Everest is also the tallest structure on all of Walt Disney World property, standing 199 feet, six inches tall, beating out the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror by six inches (Why not go another six inches, you ask? Because anything 200 feet and taller needs to have an ugly blinking light on it, that's why. Take that local ordinances!). Everest is the second Disney coaster to go backwards, but the first one to go both forwards and backwards in the same ride. And then there's the Yeti.

Image copyright Disney

First some positives about him. He's the biggest, most complex Audio-Animatronic Disney ever built. He's 25 feet tall and boasts a skin that measures just over 1,000 square feet (yes feet). When he's working, he can move five feet horizontally and a foot and a half vertically. He's really impressive. When he's working. Which he hasn't since a few months after the ride opened. But it's not apparently his fault. Rumor has it that he could still work today, that he himself is fully functional and wants to work, except for one tiny thing: the ride might disintegrate around him if he did.

When Everest was being designed and built, a fabulous new '4-D' program was used to create three separate components, the track, the show building (the mountain itself) and the Yeti figure. Each component was built individually and then slid together like a giant jigsaw puzzle, interlocking as a homogenized whole but not relying on each other structurally (or even supposedly touching). A truly great system for building something. Repairing something, though? Not so much. A miscalculation occurred when it came to the Yeti's concrete base (some blame the program, others say it happened in execution). Three months of that monster flailing around caused it to split. Because of the way all the other elements were basically slid in around the Yeti, no one can get to his base to demo and repair it without basically taking the whole ride apart. So the poor Yeti has sat, unmoving, for the last 13 years, earning the nickname Disco Yeti because plan B for him is to flash strobe lights, trying to give him the illusion of movement. Imagineers regularly insist they are working on a plan to fix him, but so far no luck. What is lucky, is the fact that Expedition Everest is a great coaster anyways.