The Geology P.A.G.E.: Geology of Disney - Disneyland's Matterhorn Bobsleds

Disneyland's Matterhorn Bobsleds

My next entry in the Geology of the Disney parks is Disneyland's Matterhorn Bobsleds ride. Based on the real Matterhorn peak in the Swiss Alps on the Italian-Switzerland Border, the ride was initially opened in 1959 and is noteworthy as Disneyland's first rollercoaster.

Matterhorn Bobsleds looking towards the northeast from the direction of Main Street.

Per the Disneyland website:

Matterhorn mountain certainly looks like its counterpart in the Swiss Alps— partially thanks to the excellent use of forced perspective. However, the peak is just a bit lower than the original—it’s exactly 100 times shorter than the 14,700-foot-tall real thing.

More than 800 gallons of paint were used to create heavier snowfall on the north-facing—just like the real Matterhorn. Glass beads on the façade glitter like actual snow!

Walt Disney fell in love with the real Matterhorn while filming the 1959 live-action film Third Man on the Mountain.

Back at Disneyland Park, Walt decided to cover a forested 20-foot-high mound named Holiday Hill with artificial snow, add a toboggan run and rename it Snow Hill. However, Walt always dreamed big, and the “hill” soon grew into a 147-foot-tall mountain. The attraction opened on June 14, 1959.

Image of Matterhorn Mountain facing towards the southwest, looking at the east and north faces of the mountain. Image courtesy of MontBlancLines.

When it was first constructed, Walt Disney had wanted the Matterhorn to look like it does from Zermatt, Switzerland, while standing on Main Street in the park. This means, however, that the ride is actually rotated compared to its real-life counterpart. When compared to different views of the ride and the mountain, it appears that the ride is rotated between 90 and 180 degrees from real-life.

Looking towards the west at the eastern side of the ride.

Disney Engineers had then wanted the ride to resemble the actual mountain even more. So, during renovations in 2012, more snow was painted on the northern side of the ride, mimicking real-life. This is because due to the track of the sun across the sky, the northern side of the mountain gets less sun overall, and therefore less snow melts, resulting in greater snow cover. However, since the ride is essentially flip-flopped backwards, that means more snow was added to the wrong side, if you are looking at the real-life counterpart, but the correct side if you assume that the ride is placed correctly. That's confusing, I know.

But, back to the geology. The real-life rocks that make up the majority of the real-life Matterhorn Mountain were formed 289 million years ago. They are a type of rock known as granodioritic orthogneiss and they belong to a group of rocks known as the Arolla Series. You can think of them as a type of granite. While the peak of the mountain is pre-Carboniferous gneiss, amphibolite, and marble of the Valpelline series, which are all metamorphic rocks. These rocks initially formed underground as magmatic intrusions within the region.

Geological diagram of the Matterhorn Mountain. Image and following description from the Virtual Explorer. From top to bottom: mainly retrogressed kinzigitic complex of Valpelline series; coarse- to fine-grained and folded gneissic granitoids of Arolla series (GA), from Permian protoliths; Permian gabbro (G) with a thick mylonitic horizon (m) between them and at the base; basal slice of micaschists; calcschists (c), prasinites (p) and mylonitic gabbros (dark green) in the underlying Combin zone (Dal Piaz, 1992; Bucher et al., 2003, 2004).

These rocks were then pulled apart and pushed back together again a few times over the many millions of years, with the final time around 65 to 50 million years ago during the Alpine Orogeny. The Alpine Orogeny occurred when the African continent crashed into the European continent, jumbling rocks from multiple different continents together and forming the Swiss Alps. This layer cake of rocks results with African Crust, Oceanic crust, and European Crust all interbedded, forming the Matterhorn structure as seem in the diagram above.

"Rocks" on the western side of the Matterhorn Bobsleds.

Pictured above and below are the "rocks" on the western side of the Matterhorn Bobsleds. While they are clearly painted representations of rocks, they are likely meant to represent the Arolla Series granodioritic orthogneiss. Again, just think of them as "granites". A closer look at these "rocks" are below:

The fracture of the rocks and the speckled pattern of the rockwork, clearly show at least some resemblance to details for the Matterhorn Mountain itself, however it is clear that these "rocks" would never pass the test as something that is actual rock. After the rocks were formed, and then jumbled together, creating the Swiss Alps Mountains as a whole, they were then slowly eroded over time.

View of the Matterhorn Bobsleds looking roughly towards the south.

This erosion has ramped up over the last 2+ million years, where glaciers had been slowly eroding the mountain peak until only the feature that we know of as the "Matterhorn" remained. This type of geological feature is actually known as a "horn". In geology, a horn is a "high pyramidal peak with steep sides formed by the intersecting walls of three or more cirques, e.g. the Matterhorn" per the Dictionary of Geological Terms. A cirque is a "deep, steep-walled recess or hollow ... situated high on the side of a mountain and produced by the erosive activity of a mountain glacier."

Although I have seen people referring to the Matterhorn as a "karling", which is a geological term I had been unfamiliar with (and one not in my dictionary). Per Huguet (2023), a karling is an "angular peak, with steep walls and sharp ridges, undercut from all sides by glaciers". This seems just a game of semantics to me, but most of the definitions of a horn used the Matterhorn as their "type" specimen, so the Matterhorn has to be a horn, by definition. But that's just my opinion.

A "cast of a footprint" displayed alongside the Matterhorn Bobsled ride

Alongside the ride there a cast of a footprint which states that it is a "Cast of footprint discovered by Matterhorn expedition south slope, May 27, 1978." This was clearly added after the creation of the ride almost 20 years earlier. While I can't confirm exact placement of this cast of a "trace fossil", it appears to have been added during the 1978 refurbishment of the ride which included the animatronic yeti, Harrold.

Enlargement of the sign set below the "footprint cast"

While obviously a fake, this does bring in the element of trace fossils into the discussion. Per one of my previous posts "What are ... trace fossils?"

[Trace Fossils} are basically what an animal creates as it does stuff. Stuff can include walking, burrowing, sitting, eating, living, etc. Whenever an animal interacts with the world around it, it leaves evidence, a trace if you will. These traces are what I study. They are not the actual animal but sometimes are found in association with the animal. The easiest way to visualize this that I can think of is with footprints in the snow (as seen below). Footprints are the most basic type of trace fossil. They illustrate locomotion of an organism, whether it is a human, a rabbit, an insect, or anything in between.

And this footprint cast also reminds me of the footprints found alongside Gertie in Animal Kingdom.