Thrill Riders, Las Vegas Sun, Dec. 26, 1996

Thrill Riders rolling out formulas for fun Lisa Ferguson Thursday, Dec. 26, 1996 | 11:59 a.m. March 25, 1994. That's the day Garlyn Norris took his first spin on the Batman The Ride roller coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Southern California. "It opened up a whole new area," the Cimarron-Memorial High School sophomore says. An area of the senses he'd never experienced. The ride, suspended from an overhead track, produces, "a different type of feeling after you get off of it," than do other rides. "You feel like you're floating on air," he says. But Batman The Ride also piqued Garlyn's curiosity: Just how does it maneuver through five loops at 50 m.p.h. and make riders feel the illusion of zero gravity? "You see it go upside down, you see it go through all kinds of tricks. You have to wonder how," he says. Finding out is the goal of the Thrill Riders, the Cimarron-Memorial club Garlyn founded this year. He also serves as its president. Each week, the club's 17 members meet to discuss the physics and figure the complex mathematical equations that make some of the world's most famous coasters and thrill rides go. Like the Rapture at the Ceder Point amusement park in Ohio, the Indiana Jones Adventure at Disneyland, and a few local heart-stoppers, including the Canyon Blaster at Grand Slam Canyon and the High Roller atop the Stratosphere Tower. "Going on rides and stuff, it's all right, but sometimes you want to go a little further, learn more about them and that's what we're about," Garlyn says. That's what prompted Christine Rost, a junior and Thrill Riders' treasurer, to join. "I just enjoy roller coasters. I thought it'd be pretty cool to know what's going on behind the scenes, about how they're made," she says. But the club's not only about numbers and tricky formulas. After all, the Thrill Riders are coaster fans first and foremost. So next month, they'll take their first rides as a group, tackling both the SkyScreamer at MGM Grand Adventures and the Manhattan Express coaster, opening next week at New York-New York, on the same day. The field trip is the first of several the club hopes to take to local amusement attractions this year. Garlyn has already checked out Manhattan Express' track from street level and says the ride will probably be "pretty good." "It just has one loop and it only goes upside-down twice, unlike the Canyon Blaster, although it's a lot higher," he says. "Mainly it's for fun, but it's not (going to be) high-paced, like loop after loop after loop." While the students are psyched about their impending rides, the club's teacher-advisor, Glenn Danner, is content just to watch. "There are some things I won't go on," Danner says. "You can go to the top of the Stratosphere and I'll take pictures of you on the Big Shot (ride), but no way" will he climb aboard. "One of the things that I would like the club to get into (is) taking video tapes and pictures (during visits) and start analyzing what's going on, getting angles, working with the formulas, trying to get them into the math concept of what's going on. "I stressed at the first meeting that this was going to look like a math class sometimes. I didn't want some yahoos to come walking in the door going, 'Let's go ride a roller coaster.' A lot of faces left after after we started putting the mathematical formulas on the board," Danner says. But Garlyn, who designs and constructs roller coaster models for fun, was thrilled. His dream coaster? "It'd be just like flying," he says. "It wouldn't be the cart and you strapped to it; it'd be you and the wheels."