Congrats, you made it through yet another snowy and cold off-season and it is now time to start thinking about summer! While I will be busy this weekend, I won’t be able to provide an opening day trip report for Hersheypark. But that doesn’t mean that I won’t have anything to share for this weekend. Switchback Saturday anyone?
Let’s travel back to the year 1996 when the Spice Girls were slowly starting to climb the music charts, everyone was doing the Macarena, and Hersheypark opened their fifth roller coaster called Wildcat. With a height of 90 feet and being the first coaster built by the now-famous Great Coasters International, visitors were urged to “Test Drive the Wildcat”.
1996 was also the park’s 90th season (the following year was the 90th anniversary.
The photo of Comet and Sooperdooperlooper shows no Great Bear and the dolphins are still in the Aquatheatre.
A website address is now listed in the brochures. The Wayback Machine does have an archive of this webpage, but the earliest entry is from 1999: Here
The other half of the brochure talks about other attractions around town and Milton Hershey’s legacy.
$26.45 for general admission. Also, instead of all the rides opening at park opening, back then, rides opened a half hour after the main gate opened.
Looks like The Hershey Lodge wasn’t expanded quite yet.
Looking ahead to next week, I will be headed east to Six Flags Great Adventure to check out Zoomanjaro and the former location of Rolling Thunder. Then I will be going up north to Knoebels to experience Flying Turns and check out the park.
Thanks for reading!
-Chris
Keystone Thrills 