#copperhead strike

Today's roller coaster is...

Copperhead Strike! (Carowinds)

Photo Sources: All photos are mine

Copperhead Strike at Carowinds!

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Opened: 2019 Manufacturer: Mack Rides Height: 82 ft (25 m) Speed: 50 mph (80 kph) Length: 3,255 ft (992 m) My most recent ride: 2019

Tacoma Nation, we are in the home stretch because welcome to my top 25! To be in the roughly top 15% of all coasters I've ridden, a ride has to be pretty dang good and Copperhead Strike is no exception!

Copperhead Strike is ride Carowinds sorely needed when it was built. For a long time, there was a significant drop off in the quality of their coasters after their big top three of Fury, Thunder Striker and Afterburn, especially after removing Thunder Road. For me, the next best coaster at the park after Afterburn was Carolina Cyclone, which is ranked all the way down at number 95 out of 170 </3 Copperhead Strike helped to round out Carowinds' lineup significantly and also gave them a MUCH needed launch coaster lol.

I'll start with literally the first thing you see when walking up to Copperhead Strike: the presentation of this ride is fantastic. It debuted with a whole new area of the park, Blue Ridge Junction, and the ride serves as the anchor point of it. The whole area and the queue line for the ride is done up really well with all kinds of theming elements, signs warning of snakes, old equipment and that kind of thing. The theme of the ride is a bit convoluted and does sorta feel like they mashed two separate themes together though. The main theme is that you're on Granny Byrd's farm and she makes her famous jam. But when you go into her barn at the beginning of the ride, you find out that she actually has a secret moonshine operation in there with some kind of secret ingredient and when she threatens to chase you out of there, that's where you launch out and the ride begins.

That's all well and good, if a bit weird, but then you may ask "but the ride is called 'Copperhead Strike', do snakes factor in at all?" Well, yes and no I think. There are signs warning of snakes all through the queue line but there's not really anything about snakes during the ride itself. The logo shows the snake to look like or be made of the copper piping in the moonshine still, so maybe that's where it comes from. My personal interpretation though is that the "secret ingredient" in the moonshine or the jam or whatever is copperhead snake venom and that's why Granny has to chase you out of the barn. That's just my Carowinds headcannon tho.

But onto the ride experience itself! There are two big areas Copperhead Strike absolutely excels in other than its theme are hang time and positive Gs. There is some really good airtime thrown in there as well, but hang time and positives are really the ride's bread and butter. The ride has five inversions: a jojo roll, two vertical loops, a corkscrew and a cutback, and most of them offer fantastic hang time. The only inversion that doesn't have as much hang time is the second vertical loop, since you have more speed going through that one so that one is stronger in the positive Gs department. I love that Carowinds and Mack Rides threw a jojo roll on this thing right out of the station like on Hydra at Dorney Park. And since Copperhead's trains have just a lap bar, it feels even more like you're just dangling there than it does on Hydra. Then the positive Gs throughout the layout are really well done too. There are so many fast paced, low-to-the-ground snappy turns that offer great positives. The entrance and exits to the vertical loops also have some sneaky good positive Gs as well.

With all the positive Gs and hang time Copperhead throws at you, it might surprise you with some really solid airtime pops as well. In particular I wanna shout out the first airtime hill after the first loop, the Stengel dive, the switchback hill right after the Stengel dive, and the last little bunny hill right before the brakes. All of these offer really sharp, sudden pops of airtime that really help to round on the ride experience. The only part of Copperhead Strike that doesn't deliver on the forces is, ironically, the launches. Mack Rides is fairly well known to not have particularly forceful launches, and even though this is the only Mack multi-launch coaster I've done at this point, it definitely rings true here. I don't think that hurts the ride too much, but being a huge fan of launch coasters, it is a bit disappointing.

In all, Copperhead Strike really is one of those full package rides to me. It's got all kinds of forces, it runs super smooth, has a lot of really fun elements and even has a very well done theme. It is a great fit for Carowinds and really rounds out their top four. I only rode this twice in its opening year, so I'm definitely interested in getting back to Carowinds to see how its running nowadays.

So I've been in a bit of a Twisted Timbers fixation today, right? And I remembered that there's a poster in the queue of Mystic Timbers that has the tractor and meteor-thing of Twisted Timbers in it. A photo of that poster can be found right here:

So this initially started with me looking back at this poster, happily remembering that the stories of Mystic Timbers and Twisted Timbers are connected, presumably by this fictional "Calico Architectural Inc." having in-universe built the Mystic Timbers and Twisted Timbers (and delightfully finding a connection to Carowinds' Copperhead Strike along the way with the comment about their latest project being in the Carolinas [if I remember correctly, there are also references to this in theming around/teasers that were made for Copperhead Strike as well connecting these rides together, although I'll be sure to re-check on that one to be sure]), when I realized that I recognized the building drawn underneath the Calico Architectural Inc. logo.

Guys...

That's the station building for The Beast.

Here's a couple of Beast station photos for comparison.

I'll admit, I was a little skeptical at first, but upon even closer inspection, I found that the drawing was also littered with a handful of Beast puns (my personal favorite being "'Beastro' Drink Stand" on the left). And then the major realization:

THERE'S A SON OF BEAST/OUTPOST 5 SYMBOL!

So in other words, this poster single-handedly directly connects the stories of:

Mystic Timbers

Twisted Timbers

Copperhead Strike

The Beast

Son of Beast

And by proxy, this also means that all of the Kings Island "Paranormal Substation" and "Project X Initiative" rides (Which I go more in detail in some of my other Kings Island lore posts) would be included in this connected storyline!

That's so cool!!!