Once upon a time, Cliff’s Amusement Park in Albuquerque, N.M., had an identity crisis. When you’re the only amusement park in your state, this sort of thing is bound to happen. It had already changed its name, one of dissatisfaction’s telltale signs, and every few years it would bring a new ride to the park—Rocky Mountain Rapids, a flume ride, in 1985, and Water Monkeys Adventure, a water play area in 1991—but the real crowd-pleaser, the marquee ride, was still missing. Park-goers knew it. The management at Cliff’s knew it, too. “We had been aware for 10 years that a ride like the New Mexico Rattler was what we needed to add to get to the next level,” says Gary Hays who, along with his wife, Linda, daughter of the original owners of the park, operates Cliff’s. “We were looking as far back as the mid-’90s at Custom Coasters coasters and at a few other things. After coming off a good year in 2001, we contacted Custom Coasters International and decided to bite the bullet.” First, though, a little history: Clifford and Zella Hammond opened Uncle Cliff’s Kiddieland outside Albuquerque in 1959 with a go-kart track and eight kiddie rides. When the city zoned the park outside of its location in the early 1960s, the story goes that Cliff, a former air-traffic controller, went downtown to the top of what was then the tallest building in the city, the First National Bank, and looked to see which direction Albuquerque was growing. His assessment: north. Uncle Cliff’s moved north. Gary Hays met Linda Hammond in 1974. Hays had moved to Albuquerque with his band, Jonah, he says, “to further my rock and roll career.” He has since become a member of a large club of individuals who never expected to be in the amusement industry but ended up with a long career in it nonetheless. Thirty years ago, when an employee phoned in sick at the last minute, Hays was called to the front by the Hammonds. “My first ride experience was running the Ferris wheel,” he says. “After that, the park was short of people, so they offered me a job.” Back in the early 1960s, the area around Cliff’s remained fairly undeveloped. Interstate 25 was only two blocks away, though, and Cliff Hammond’s forecast turned out to be prophetic. When the city grew, it indeed grew north. In 1985, the park bought nine neighboring acres on which Water Monkeys Adventure, a tropical-themed SCS Interactive water play area, now sits. Cliff’s currently occupies 15 acres in a bustling retail strip; so bustling that the only direction Cliff’s can expand is up. It is completely hemmed in by restaurants, car dealerships, and self-storage warehouses. In 1992, Linda and Gary decided to drop the “Uncle” and the “Kiddieland” and change the name to Cliff’s Amusement Park, a move Hays says was an effort to appeal to a broader demographic. Even though the closest thrill park to Cliff’s—Six Flags Elitch Gardens in Denver—is 450 miles away, for Cliff’s to be competitive, it needed a large-scale addition. “In this business there are only a couple of rides that can bring your park up a notch,” Hays says. “And a coaster is definitely one of them.” Rattling Their Chains “Since we had never built a coaster before,” Gary Hays says, “we weren’t really sure what to expect.” In the case of the New Mexico Rattler, the only thing the Hayses could have expected and not have been disappointed was the unexpected. After a good season in 2001 and with the specter of the September 11 attacks hanging over the world and the tourism industry in particular, the Hayses met with Custom Coasters International in October, intending to add a wooden coaster to their park. Cliff’s has limited ground space and the Hayses wanted to maintain the original walkways, so a coaster was designed that would weave through, above, and around the park’s other rides. For the Rattler to wind around the park’s other rides, it needed a steel skeleton instead of a wooden one, which would have been too unwieldy. So Custom Coasters created a special hybrid metal-and-wooden frame, keeping the familiar tat-tat-tat ride of a wooden coaster, and at the same time maximizing vertical space. “Our main criterion was that we did not want to have to move any of the other rides,” Hays says. “We also wanted an underground tunnel and a lot of excitement during the ride in general. We didn’t need it to be the tallest or fastest.” In February 2002, hopes were high when ground was broken on the then-unnamed $2 million wooden coaster at Cliff’s. The media, Hays says, “was all over it.” New Mexico’s only amusement park was bringing New Mexico’s only thrill ride. The park announced a Name-The-Coaster contest, as well as plans to premiere the Rattler in July of that year. Construction continued while the park was operating, a task Hays describes as “very arduous.” They had to close the kiddieland section next to the would-be coaster on some days because of construction hazards. But of the issues that would plague the coaster’s unveiling, kiddieland closure was the least of Hays’s worries. Permit problems from the city were the first hurdle to opening on time, but a newly elected, more business-minded mayoral administration helped clear those up pretty quickly. Not long after that, though, Hays began to realize the park had a problem. Construction wasn’t moving nearly as quickly as Hays thought it would. “In May, we realized it wasn’t going to open on time,” he says. The opening was pushed back to August, which is late in the season, but still allowed enough weekends to salvage the summer. Excitement for the New Mexico Rattler, named by an area four-year-old, still ran high. The park had scheduled a media event to announce progress on the coaster on the morning of July 12, the day on which, back in February, the Hayses had planned to debut the Rattler. That morning, Denise Dinn-Larrick, president of Custom Coasters, called the park to tell them the company intended to file bankruptcy. At the time, the Rattler was 75 percent finished. But Hays didn’t panic. He phoned the Custom Coasters warehouse in West Chester, Ohio, and the employees loaded the remaining materials onto trucks and shipped it to Albuquerque. He hired the 16 newly unemployed Custom Coasters employees who were already in Albuquerque to continue working on the project, and brought in 10 additional local workers to help hasten construction. He also shelled out about a $500,000 above the original $2 million design costs. The park had already contracted with Philadelphia Toboggan Coasters to provide the cars, which it did without a snare. Only two-and-a-half months after the Hayses had originally intended to debut the coaster, in late September 2002, the Rattler finally opened. A more-restrained celebration and quieter media coverage followed, but Cliff’s finally had its thrill ride. With still a month left in its 2002 season, Cliff’s new coaster attracted the attention of the park’s main guest base—the local residents—and was covered in the Albuquerque Journal and in several other area media outlets. So far in 2003, “we have received a very positive reaction to it,” Hays says. “It’s definitely a thrill ride; it runs nonstop.” Hays notes that the American Coaster Enthusiasts (ACE) held its regional meeting at the park in early May, an event that would have been untenable a year ago with just the Galaxi, a prefab coaster added in the 1970s. Hays said that ACE members were very enthusiastic (as only coaster enthusiasts can be) about the new wooden coaster. The Results Are In The track accommodates only one train; the ride lasts just 53 seconds. But on the day I visited, the Rattler was all that most patrons, waiting in front of Cliff’s for it to open, talked about. One of the teenage boys in front of me said to a friend, “You can ride what you want. All I want to go on is the Rattler.” Because of Cliff’s limited footprint, the coaster has a lot of sharp curves and dips, not so much an out-and-back coaster as a back-and-forth one. Walking through the park, you can hear screams and the tat-tat-tat-tat from the coaster ahead of you, 10 seconds later to the left of you, 10 seconds later behind you. The space limitations also mean that from nearly every area of the park there is some visibility of the Rattler, its first hill most notably, with the big American flag fluttering at the peak. From a shaded pavilion, you can see a sharp bend leading into the tin-sided tunnel Hays insisted on (one of the most enjoyable parts of the ride, by the way). It is a perfect sort of in-park advertising. With a pay-as-you-go policy (as well as the one-price option) in place at the park, this panoptic view serves to tempt all those who thought they would ride the Rattler just once ($6). Aboard the Rattler, Cliff’s visitors are provided with another vista: the barren Sandia Mountains, which sit to the east of Albuquerque, coming into view as they mount the first hill. After a slow ascent, and just as the Sandias are in full view, riders plunge to a smooth but circuitous tour of the park, maxing out at nearly 55 mph. “The reason we built the Rattler was to attract a bigger audience,” Hays says. “Though we’re still a local park, we want to create more tourism for the area. We want to get tourists who come to Albuquerque to stay at least one more night.” Despite the fact that Cliff’s is the only amusement park in New Mexico, and is more than 450 miles from the nearest thrill-ride park, a visitor base is still no sure thing. Though Albuquerque has about 450,000 residents, the state of New Mexico has a population of only 1.5 million. The park attracted 250,000 visitors last year, and Hays expects that figure to increase by about 30 percent because of the addition of the Rattler. That projection is supported by May 2003’s 30-percent jump from a year ago. The increase in ticket sales means re-evaluating staff size. Hiring is mainly a seasonal proposition, although Cliff’s does have 16 full-time employees, most of whom are responsible for maintaining the park’s 80 rides and attractions on and off season. The park recruits 125 more employees for the summer season, during which Cliff’s is open four days a week. To accomplish this, Hays relies heavily on area high school students, recruiting them through school job fairs as early as February. A cursory look around Cliff’s, at the kids sweeping the walkways and working the food and ticket counters, shows the average employee age to be no more than 16. Though Hays and his wife admit they don’t do much national advertising, they do focus heavily on the Cliff’s web site, which they have upgraded with QuickTime movies and thorough information about the park. Locally, the park advertises through the Chamber of Commerce and through area publications and guides that reach residents and travelers who are already in the region. Though Cliff’s has added a multimillion dollar thrill ride, Hays hasn’t moved his allegiances elsewhere. He is quick to point out the contribution to the amusement industry made by small parks like his. “Though the focus may have shifted toward the larger, more corporate parks, my opinion is that small parks like Cliff’s are the backbone of the amusement industry.” Regarding the epic of the Rattler, Gary Hays is dismissive. “Sure, it was a challenge,” he says matter-of-factly, “but that’s part of the business.”
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