Alright let's give this a proper rundown...
Valleyfair announced today that everything within the red circle below will be bulldozed,
your final day to ride is this weekend;
Half the waterpark is going bye bye with a few weeks of summer left to go, river included. That's a lot of waterpark to demolish and rebuild. In other words, very big deal. What it does represent is huge potential, especially since the infrastructure is old, some body slides redundant, and there's terrain involved.
Last month, corporate
filed a trademark for
SUPERIOR SHORES WATERPARK [#99282409 on USPTO]. This is in Minnesota and all as well as having just been teased, so it's a guarantee that the Soak City brand will be left behind.
There were also two sets of knows permits filed with the City for
M2 - Lagoon Area Footings and Foundation Walls and
M1 - Slide Tower Footings & Retaining Wall Footings. The Retaining Wall is important as they'll be constructing new slides on the hillside.
As briefly touched on above,
the park did take out a $45,370,410.00 mortgage at the beginning of the year, about double what was taken out at the time of Renegade's construction. This is most likely a way of refinancing debt though and doesn't really loom too much over the project.
In terms of what's actually getting added... well there is room to be optimistic. I've heard that this was originally intended for last year but was postponed due to the corporate budget, which could mean a few different things but mostly that it's been in the cooker for a bit (no SFA inventory dump!).
WhiteWater West is Team Zimmerman's preferred partner so I'd expect to see their catalogue of slides here. Replacing the five body slides on their own would create room, but the raft slide going means that a larger water attraction is almost certainly be on the table. There will be a new kid's area as well, I'd also say that a new lazy river route will come in just so that they don't need to design new infrastructure around the old one.
A lot of thoosies are taking the piss out on this not being a coaster. Unfortunately for them however, waterparks sell well and this is still a substantial investment, dare I say likely the largest on the Legacy Cedar Fair side of things in 2026. Might not be what we all wanted but good on Valleyfair for finally going ahead with such a huge project!
