The signs about Rancho San Rafael and the attractions therein are the same, except for the one on the far left that is a map of Great Basin Adventure. The “entrance” portal no longer advertises itself as an entrance, but it still stands in good shape. The admission gate/park office still stands, but there’s no real indication what this building is supposed to be, or what sits behind it. Now the sign is gone and the flower bed has been allowed to grow. There used to be a large sign advertising the Great Basin Adventure, in a manicured flower bed. The Entranceįrom the parking lot you can see an immediate difference. So let’s take a visit to the Great Basin Adventure, accompanied by recent photos showing how much change has happened in the last 12 years. I had the foresight to take many pictures, not knowing that one day they would become a historical record. That was 4 years before it closed, though I obviously didn’t realize it at the time. The most extensive documentation I have of the park is from the one time I visited there, in 2006. Visitors today would see it as an interesting corner of a larger park and little else.īut this post wouldn’t be worth publishing if it stopped there. At some point it was renamed “Nevada Farms and Families.” Nowadays there’s not much evidence of its former life, aside from the eerie abandoned log ride and a few other telltale remnants. But the playground, walking trails, and picnic facilities have been left open to the public. That meant the log ride, pony rides, and petting zoo were shut down. Since it was already located in a county park, with grounds and maintenance personnel already on payroll, they decided to remove the admission fee, open the gates to everyone, and only close down the parts of the park that required extra costs to operate. Where many closed theme parks are padlocked and left to rot, they went a different route with Great Basin Adventure. The closure was not the end of the Great Basin Adventure, though.
So I would suppose that it existed in some form since the 1980s? I’m not sure when it opened, but the announcement about it closing mentioned that some of the facilities were over 20 years old.
It closed down in 2010, when budget cuts left it with no money to operate. And that’s about all the info I can find on the park. This review mentions a $10 day pass that includes unlimited log rides.
For that price you didn’t even get access to the log ride that was $2 extra. And what might be considered the crown jewel of the park was a log flume ride, just like Disneyland and Six Flags have, where you were sent careening over a waterfall in a fiberglass log.Īccording to this website, one of the few that has info about the park, the admission fee was $5 for adults and $3.50 for children. There was a petting zoo, a playground, and pony rides. There was a replica mine building, not quite as detailed as the mine at the Nevada State Museum but along those same lines. It was a full-fledged theme park with an admission fee, though there was little inside to justify the fee. This small park sat in Rancho San Rafael Park in northwest Reno, next door to the Wilbur D. I’m not talking about Wild Island, or the carnival rides that were once at Idlewild Park, I’m talking about the Great Basin Adventure. There’s very little info about it online, and I only went once while it was open. Even though it’s a fairly recent memory, it also feels obscure enough that most people might not know about it. How many of you knew that Reno used to have a theme park? I’m genuinely curious because I’m not sure how popular it ever was.
0 kommentar(er)
