Iron Wolf - The Last Stand

Six Flags Great America – Gurnee, Illinois

It was not so very long ago that the Iron Wolf was my favorite roller coaster at Six Flags Great America. I think the year was 2005. Back then I found a dynamic, twisting layout that was deceptively longer than it looked, and despite being a compact B&M coaster on a small plot of land in the back corner of the park, it was old enough that the trees had grown so tight around the track that at times it felt like we could have been a mile removed in a remote forest. Another reason it was my favorite was because it reliably had the shortest queue for any major roller coaster in the park. This unpopularity was probably mostly attributable to its oft denounced status among park-goers as “rough”. I hear this said about a lot of coasters, and I rarely understand it. When people are flaming a coaster in online message boards about how it cracked their spine in two and caused cranial hemorrhaging, and then I ride the coaster in question and don’t have any problems whatsoever, I have been led to believe one of three conclusions:

1): That I am very lucky that I always get to ride rough coasters on their one ‘good’ day out of the year.

2): That most enthusiast’s skeletal structures are made of Crispix.

3): That I am a masochist without realizing it.

While generally I like to believe hypothesis #2, my continued loyalty to the Iron Wolf even after getting pulverized by the restraints on several occasions might indicate I should more carefully consider hypothesis #3 in the future. Opening in 1990 as B&M’s first roller coaster as an independent company, the Iron Wolf represents the Swiss firm at their absolute rawest. At times we’re jolted around not simply due to of loose wheel assemblies or a primitive heartline technique that’s only calculated up to the second derivative, but because the track itself is misshapen (you can see a big kink halfway down the curving first drop). Knowing all of that, I’m not pained or discomforted by this coaster at all. Maybe I’ve somehow adapted a better self-defense technique against these rides than most people. I can subject myself to all the jostling whilst carefully avoiding any fatal blows which allows me to climb off it in perfect, healthy condition but weary of all the hard work I had to put in to stay that way… this seems to be a better adrenaline rush and scare factor than all the uber-controlled coasters that try to feign intimidation. Even up to its last day, I never once actively regretted taking a dance with this wolf.

Today was the end of an era, the final operating day of the first B&M coaster ever built at its original location. Starting tomorrow, crews would begin dismantling the structure to prepare it for relocation to Six Flags America near Washington D.C., where it would be reborn as the Apocalypse. I was expecting to see queues over an hour in length as local fans and enthusiasts rushed to take one final stand on the Iron Wolf after providing over two decades of thrills for Chicagoans. We never waited longer than ten minutes. As the evening approached zero-hour, the fans were even more thinly spread. It was a thankless farewell. A small group of coaster enthusiasts waited by the entrance for them to close off access, either unaware that the queue was so short that we were running laps around them, or else they were posers who had no real enthusiasm for the Iron Wolf and simply wanted the last ride for posterity. Was I the last friend the Iron Wolf would ever have?

“Howl if you’re excited to be here for Iron Wolf’s last day ever!”

“Howooooo…!”

“Howl if the Iron Wolf is your favorite ride at Six Flags!”

(dead silence)

This was also my friend Dan’s first time riding the Iron Wolf. He’s not a coaster enthusiast, yet. I tried to tell him as little about the coaster as I could, for fear of swaying his opinion to my favor too much and not getting an honest reaction from him. After our first ride together (which I got a little beat up on, taking the hits on the outside seat of the front row so he could have the smoother middle seat), I asked him what he thought.

“That was a pretty good one. I approve.”

Even after its condemnation, the coaster was still able to win at least one new admirer for its own merits. Later we rode in a back outside row and Dan’s appraisal was a little more hesitant, but we agreed we would like to finish the night getting as many rides as we could anyway. We joined the queue for the front row about ten minutes to park closing. Everyone wanted the front row. This made the attendants angry as they needed bodies to fill the remaining six rows and they were only sending a limited number of trains out before the end of the night. She counted off, pointing to Dan, me, and the two single riders behind us:

“You four are going to be on the last train. Everyone else needs to fill the rest of the empty seats or you are not going to ride!”

All the posers grumbled as their plan to wait until the moment before the entrance closed to snag the last ride blew up in their face. Meanwhile, our final group of four celebrated our victory as we inched nearer to the air gates, offering to snap each other’s photos for this momentous last ride. The Iron Wolf was old and rusty and kind of rough, but we were all ecstatic to be here. After twenty-two years of service, it was our time to ride.

I’m going to miss the Iron Wolf. I’m going to miss the chug-chug of the train rumbling onto the lift, with the underside of the car chassis clipping against a metal handrail. I’m going to miss the lift hill peering out over the trees in a remote corner of the park, and the awkward intensity of the first drop. I’ll miss flipping upside-down in the first loop, catching a faint hint of hang time, and wondering if I’ll be able to survive the next turns. I’ll miss the aerial maneuvers over the old timey county fair station house with its little flag fluttering below, and the midcourse block brake pause that never was. Most of all I’ll miss the twisted second half of the ride, which will never be the same at Six Flags America. There are so many trees that at times the rusty red track seems to be enclosed in a tunnel of pine and bark. It was not until this last day that I was finally able to figure out in my head exactly the layout this convoluted figure eight takes through the forest (turns out it’s almost identical to the finale of Mantis!), and being able to see it all out in the open on an empty field in Maryland will deflate a lot of the reason I still call myself a fan of the Iron Wolf.

The move was nevertheless still a wise one. It was painfully clear that the Iron Wolf had long since stopped serving its purpose for Six Flags Great America, and it will help out a park in desperate need of a new attraction after over a decade of loosing thrill rides. And we have X-Flight to fill the void. I’m skeptical it will ever be able to match the Wolf’s rustic intensity, but it’s doubtless it will be a far better fit for Great America’s needs over the next two decades than the Iron Wolf would have been. And looking further ahead, I can’t help but notice that the plot of land formerly occupied by the coaster will be sitting empty, in a corner of the park that could really use a big new attraction to circulate the crowds. As good as X-Flight looks, might even better things come as a result of this loss of an important coaster milestone? We shall see…

Part One – Part Two – Batman: The Ride – Raging Bull – X-Flight

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