It's the wildest ride in the wilderness!
As the story goes, sometime in the late 1800s, gold was discovered on Big Thunder Mountain somewhere in the southwest. Overnight, the small mining town of Tumbleweed got rich under the thumb of greedy mining company owner, Barnabas T. Bullion. An extensive line of mine trains was set up to transport the valuable ore; but, unknown to the settlers, the mountain was sacred…and cursed.
Before long, the settlers' desecration of the mountain brought about a flash flood and the town was abandoned.
Some time later, the unmanned locomotives were found racing around the mountain on their own. BTMR was founded in the old mining camp to allow wanderers to take rides on the possessed trains.
Big Thunder is one of my oldest memories of Disney. It opened in 1980 and we rode it on our first trip there in 1982. The ride broke down part of the way through and we had to climb down the mountain to get off. For the longest time, when I was a little girl, I would tell everyone that I climbed down Thunder Mountain.
I took this in broad daylight with an NDR filter on my lens to reduce the light enough to leave my shutter open and catch the movement of the train as it emerged from this tunnel—35mm, f/16, 1/8 seconds, ISO 640. The result is a crisp mountain with a blur of the haunted train.
The attraction is currently closed for an extensive renovation, so I thought this might be fun to share today as we await its reopening, which won’t likely be until some time next year.