Defiance Coaster opens at Glenwood adventure park

GLENWOOD SPRINGS — Subsequent a quick hairpin ascent, you’re graced with a amazing view of the Roaring Fork Valley.

And barely sufficient time to acquire it all in.

Prior to you have time to exhale, it is long gone in a woosh. Gravity pulls you down, but it also pulls you in, beneath, and additional down than you have felt just before.

Long gone is any experience of anticipation — it is just exhilaration now as you last but not least enable a breath out in the last corkscrew turn.

Then, a lot less than a moment just before it started, you’re left with just one question: Are you prepared to hop on the Defiance Coaster once again?

“The scariest section is the anticipation, heading up and hunting out at the blue yonder,” Glenwood Caverns Journey Park Normal Manager Nancy Read said right after riding the rollercoaster for the ninth time. “Nothing can substitute the experience of getting on top of that hill.”

The pause is just enough time to take in the see of all the things from Mount Sopris to Crimson Mountain and West Glenwood in advance of you plunge straight back again down at a 102.3-diploma freefall drop.

The entire journey lasts about 56 brief and sweet seconds right after the powerful buildup and drops in the beginning. 

“It was the smoothest roller coaster,” 1st-time rider Quinn Helbling reported. “It was grand.”

She visited the park Tuesday from Montrose for the 1st time with her husband Darren Helbling and pal Chad Stafford, from Denver, who experienced told them about the park.

Quinn generally seeks thrills driving her dust bicycle, but the coaster even now manufactured her nervous, particularly when she couldn’t do something to gradual herself down. Stafford and Darren had by now ridden the rollercoaster a handful of instances and right away jumped back again in line to trip the Defiance Coaster again. 

Defiance was the first name for Glenwood Springs and a excellent identify for the seemingly gravity-defying journey.

“You go from emotion finish weightlessness to sensation as while you weigh much more,” Darren Helbling reported.

Even while the trip was opened all through the Fourth of July weekend, the grand opening and ribbon slicing for the Defiance rollercoaster is Saturday. The opening celebration will incorporate swag, grand prize giveaways, minimal version pins for the initially 100 company, and a effectiveness by Paisley Park, a well-known Prince protect band.

Defiance is the greatest rollercoaster in the western United States, sitting down atop Iron Mountain at 7,132 toes previously mentioned sea level. 

“We have unparalleled sights,” Read explained. “Insider’s idea: sit in the front.”