As the original Disney theme park, Disneyland, in Anaheim, Calif., celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, a lot of attention is being paid to the company’s history in the Golden State.
But Colorado has its fair share of Disney lore as well, from the state’s ties to a never-built ski resort in Mineral King, Calif. to providing inspiration for the Main Street, USA, section of Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Here are five surprising Colorado connections to the Disney legacy.
Fort Collins inspired Main Street, USA
Disneyland is almost as synonymous with Main Street, USA — the area closest to the park’s entrance, brimming with charming storefronts including an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, penny arcade and firehouse, all designed to look like an idealized American town at the turn of the 20th century — as Walt is with Mickey. (There are also iterations of the thoroughfare in other Disney parks around the globe, including Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom and Disneyland Paris.)
Although some diehard Disney fans may know that the area is partly modeled after Walt Disney’s hometown of Marceline, Mo., not everyone knows that it’s also modeled after a Colorado town.
That’s because Harper Goff, a Disney art director who was born and grew up in Fort Collins, worked on early renderings for the original California park back in the 1950s. Inspired by his birthplace, he envisioned a street lined with period brick and red stone buildings, mansard roofs and Victorian ironwork. (Disneyland’s City Hall, for instance, was inspired by the Larimer County Courthouse.) Today, Disney fans can visit a mural in downtown Fort Collins that pays tribute to Goff. It also includes scenes from some of the concepts he helped create, including the Jungle Cruise attraction and the live-action film “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”
Disney almost built a ski resort in Colorado — with help from a famous Colorado skier
Back in the 1960s, Walt Disney already had a major success on his hands with Disneyland. But he had another idea for a new type of vacation destination that was bound to change outdoor recreation the same way he had altered amusement parks: a Disney ski area and year-round resort. Walt — a novice skier who paid tribute to his love of the sport in “The Art of Skiing,” a 1941 animated short starring a clumsy Goofy learning to ski — was determined to make skiing a fun, family-friendly activity (back then, the sport catered mostly to athletic adults), all while ensuring visitors got a sense of the great outdoors.
Walt’s partner on the project was Willy Schaeffler, a German-born skier who emigrated to Colorado after World War II and who helped build out the Arapahoe Basin area. Schaeffler also was head ski coach at the University of Denver from 1948 to 1970, where his team won 13 of the 18 NCAA championships that took place during Schaeffler’s tenure. Walt and Willy met when they worked on the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley (now Palisades Tahoe), California; Walt was director of pageantry, and Schaeffler oversaw the downhill skiing events.
After the Olympics, the pair began thinking about creating their own year-round ski destination, and Walt sent Schaeffler on a scouting mission. Sites in Colorado were considered, but Disney ultimately landed on Mineral King, Calif., for its ski resort. Although the Disney company tried to get the project built for nearly a decade following Walt’s death in 1966, pushback from environmental groups — and a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court — ultimately doomed the project.
Celebrity Sports Center was a training ground for Walt Disney World employees
Castles, cartoons … and bowling? Although Disney’s ski resort was not to be, Walt did get involved in the recreational entertainment game in one big way. Walt was one of the original investors in Celebrity Sports Center, an indoor recreation center that opened in 1960 in Glendale, near South Colorado Boulevard and East Kentucky Avenue. The seven-acre site put an Olympic-sized swimming pool and an 80-lane bowling alley under the same roof, along with midway games, bumper cars, a shooting gallery, slot car racing, billiards tables, and food and drink options including an English-style pub, a cocktail lounge, and a dark-paneled, high-end eatery. And it lived up to its “celebrity” name: Besides Walt and Roy Disney, other investors included comedians Jack Benny and George Burns, crooners Bing Crosby and Burl Ives, and TV host Art Linkletter. The Disney brothers bought out the other investors not long after the center opened, with Disney becoming the sole owner.
The first in a proposed nationwide chain of indoor, all-weather recreation centers, Celebrity also was used as a training ground for employees of Walt Disney World and the never-built Mineral King ski resort. But the indoor funland stayed local to Denver, with Disney eventually selling the business in 1979. The complex shut its doors in 1994.
In the 1980s, the Vail Ski Resort took inspiration from Disney
Disney never opened the Mineral King resort, but the idea of a Disney ski area lived on in a way — in Colorado. In the 1980s, when Vail was sold after struggling financially, newly appointed president and CEO Mike Shannon had a vision to turn things around by making Vail into a family-friendly resort. Shannon was friends with then-Disney president Frank Wells, and he arranged a visit to Disney Imagineering headquarters in California to look at the Mineral King plans for inspiration.
The family-friendly version of Vail — featuring ski-through attractions like the Dragon’s Breath Mine and costumed characters like Jackrabbit Joe and Sourdough Pete — debuted soon after. Most impressively, Shannon arranged for Sport Goofy — the athletic version of the famous cartoon canine who appeared in shorts like “The Art of Skiing” — to become Vail’s unofficial mascot for a few years in the late ’80s and early ’90s, attending grand openings and hanging out with young skiers at Vail’s ski school.
The oldest attraction in Disneyland was created in Colorado
A 1956 trip that Walt and his wife, Lillian, took to Colorado Springs resulted in what is, by far, the oldest attraction in Disneyland — a petrified tree stump in Frontierland that is at least 55 million years old. Walt bought the 10-foot-tall stump at a tourist attraction called Pike’s Petrified Forest near Colorado Springs and presented it to Lillian as a joke gift for their 31st wedding anniversary.
The tree made its official Disneyland debut in September 1957, with a plaque noting that it was “part of a sub-tropical forest in what is now Colorado, said by scientists to have been of Redwood or Sequoia species. During some prehistoric era, a cataclysmic upheaval caused silica-laden water to overspread the living forest — wood cells were changed during the course of time to sandstone — opals were formed within the tree trunk itself.”
Kathryn Mayer and Greg Glasgow are Colorado-based writers who wrote extensively about Willy Schaeffler and Disney’s Mineral King resort in “Disneyland on the Mountain: Walt, the Environmentalists, and the Ski Resort That Never Was,” published in 2023 by Rowman & Littlefield.