The pinnacle of Splash Mountain towers some 87 feet into the air; that's about 12 feet higher than the Sleeping Beauty Castle. You can get a great view of Disneyland from up there; albeit a very brief one – less than a second – just long enough to get a last gasp of air before you plunge at 40 miles per hour down a terrifyingly steep ramp into the Briar Patch.
Based on the 1946 movie Song of the South, Splash Mountain is Disney's most successful attempt to date at blending the throat-clutching chills of a hi-tech thrill ride with the complex demands of a traditional show attraction that tells a story.
Guests board seven-passenger, hollowed-out logs that travel through approximately a half mile of twisty backwoods waterways. Gone are the tubular steel tracks of traditional hard rides; instead, these vehicles travel at an average velocity of four feet per second in a flume seven feet wide and three deep with an average water depth of 18 inches. There is a 475,000-gallon water reservoir capacity with 20,000 gallons per minute flowing past any one point. The nine-minute ride incorporates three lifts and five drops. The climax, a knuckle-whitening drop of 52 ½ feet down a 47-degree water chute into Brer Rabbit's fog enshrouded Briar Patch, gives the ride its name.
Splash Mountain began in 1983 when Tony Baxter, then Chief Designer for Disneyland and originator of the concept for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, which had opened a few years earlier, suggested building a log flume ride based on the adventures of Brer Rabbit.
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