Mar
25
The Stratosphere hotel/casino towers over 1,000 feet high and features three rides on the very top, all of them terrifying.
Insanity
This is the newest ride, opening on March 10, 2005. It’s a spinning ride that dangles you over the edge. I admit I was too apprehensive to try it. Maybe it was the screams and the look of sheer terror on the faces of the riders as I watched them from the observation deck, or maybe it’s just that I didn’t care to be dangled a sixth of a mile from the ground that day. Or maybe it’s that a month after the ride opened, two riders were stuck dangling over the edge for an hour and a half when high winds caused the ride to shut itself down.
X Scream
This one is a see-saw thingie that dangles you over the edge. It doesn’t go as far over the edge as Insanity, and you definitely feel more enclosed and grounded, so I imagine it’s not nearly as terrifying. I have to “imagine” because while I’ve ridden X Scream I haven’t tried Insanity yet. Still, it’s pretty scary if you’re scared of heights. One nice touch is that on one of the runs after your cars get to the edge of the platform, the whole arm stutters and drops the angle even more, making you think for a second that the thing broke and you’re about to hurtle towards your death, ha ha. It opened on Halloween 2003. In Nov. 2005 six Japanese tourists were stranded on the ride for an hour and a half when the power went out.
Big Shot
This is the one that made the Stratosphere famous. You’re strapped into a chair with your legs dangling, and then they shoot you straight up the tower’s steeple, 160 feet in two seconds, at four G’s. Then they freefall you so you get negative G’s, then shoot you up again, etc. If this ride started at ground level it would be scary, but add to that the fact that you’re a fifth of a mile from the ground and it’s terrifying. As you’re going up you worry that the brakes will fail and you’ll go straight off the steeple and land down the strip at the Sahara.
High Roller
Bye, bye, High Roller. In early 2006 the venerable High Roller was removed to make way for a new observation deck. I’m a bit nostalgic for the High Roller though. It was the very first ride built on top of the Stratosphere, doing a few circles around the tower, and was surprisingly tame. It never went very fast, probably because if it did the centrifugal force would have destablized the whole tower. But it did give you an awesome view of the strip, and all of Las Vegas actually, since you went all the way around the tower a few times, and it was a good one to ride if you wanted to ride something on top of the Stratosphere but the other rides were too terrifying. Now, if you want to ride something on top of the Strat, you have no choice but to have the bejeezus scared out of you.
