Volume 2, No. 14. July 26, 2002
New Arrivals
It’s
an aquatic center & Foam Factory!
Wilderness Hotel & Golf Resort in the Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, announces
the arrival of Lake Wilderness and Dodgem City’s Timberland Playhouse,
June 21, 2002. Measurements for Lake Wilderness: 50,000 square feet (4,645 square
meters) with 16,000 square-foot (1,486 square meters) pool containing an island,
one tube slide, one body slide, two speed slides, one activity pool, one kiddie
pool, one five-lane lap pool and two whirlpools. Measurements for Timberland
Playhouse, three stories high, 20,000 square feet (1,858 square meters),
13 ball blasters and four cannons. Delivered by Badger Swimpools, National Rock,
ProSlide Technology, Ramacker Engineering and SCS Interactive.
It
was a quiet opening. Well, quiet may not be the right word. No Foam Factory
or aquatic area is quiet when in use, and these two were put into immediate
use when they opened to the guests of the 443-room (162 of those opening with
this summer’s expansion), 28-villa and 88-condo resort. But while they
may have debuted to the immediate swoosh-swoosh of tubes speeding down waterslides
and the whoop-whoop of foam balls shooting from wilderness themed blasters,
the two additions opened without much marketing hoopla.
That
will come later this season, promises Joe Eck, Wilderness’ director of
sales and marketing, when the resort celebrates “a successful season”
while formally announcing a new 65,000-square-foot (6,039 square meters) indoor
waterpark scheduled to open by Christmas.
The
additions of this summer help round out the resort’s entertainment amenities
to its guests, Eck said. “We listen to what the guests want, and they wanted
an activity that doesn’t involve getting wet,” he said. Hence, the
resort settled on installing the Timberland Playhouse, a thoroughly themed
SCS Foam Factory with Delta Play elements (an outcome of those two firms being
part of the Koala family). “This is open for an hour after our waterparks
close, and the flow of people that go in there at that time is amazing.”
The unit covers all demographics, from its toddler crawl zones to the ball blasters
themed as logs, beavers and skunks and cannons that look like tree stumps spurting
foam balls. “I see more parents than kids in here a lot of the time,”
Eck said.
Though guests wanted some dry time, the resort’s number one draw is still its waterparks. Lake Wilderness, which expands the resort’s total waterpark square footage to 232,000 (21,554 square meters), was a response to requests from adult guests who wanted more traditional, leisurely waterpark activities. “Wilderness is everything we didn’t have at the other pool,” Eck said, like the lap pool, the activity pools, and the centerpiece element, the “lazy lake,” as Eck calls it, with a current gently moving water around an island. The island itself is a big draw for guests who can lay back in lounge chairs settled on the island’s underwater ledge.
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