February 8, 2008 - 2 Views of the Matterhorn

Last year, I purchased eight binders full of slides from someone's vacations in the 1970s. I estimate there are close to a thousand slides, some commercial, and some taken by the vacationers. I have began to slowly digitize the interesting ones, in order to preserve these folks memories for a couple more years. The scanned slides will be on my Flickr account.

While there are no Disney ones, I did find some examples of things which inspired attractions in Disney parks. This is the first: A shot of the true Matterhorn, followed by the scale version in Disneyland.

January 17, 2008 - The Matterhorn

Matterhorn, originally uploaded by Jeremy ES.

" [Joe] Fowler had faced some construction challenges before, but building a mountain with five hundred tons of steel, with no two pieces the same length, proved particularly exasperating. Equally challenging, though, was the task put before Bill Evans's landscape group. For probably the first time in history, landscapers found themselves called upon to determine just what would constitute a "timberline" on a fourteen-story building. Evans finally concluded that it would be about halfway up the summit, between sixty-five and seventy-five feet up the Matterhorn's slopes. He then applied the same sense of forced perspective that Disney's architects had used in many parts of the Park. At the higher elevations, Evans's staff dangled precariously from cranes as they planted stunted spruce trees, while, at the base, full-grown trees rose above thousands of flowers."

-Disneyland: Inside Story