Youre safely in a harness, feeling the wind in your hair.

Roller coasters are like a conve where it can go any direction it wants to go.

It can do anything it wants to d And then you make it back to the run safely, and you're like, what just happened?

the cannonball is the, most aggressive ride in the park And it runs a minute and a half and chills.

a classic out and back woodie You feel almost every wooden nail on that coaste as it goes through.

But that's part of the fun.

just a classic wooden roller co like the Cannonball is something that we don't have much anymore.

And It's a little rickety but it's also, you know, it's sa And in today's time, that clickety clack of the wooden coaster is just known and loved by many said that we reached 50 miles an I think it might be a little qui You never see a train for me without a load of smiles on it.

The Cannon Ball roller coaster was designed by Philadelphia Toboggan Company.

under the auspices of John Allen peopl that know, roller coasters all k nothing really fancy about it you know, it's got the, buzz bar the lap bars, which, they call b It's pulled by a 75 horsepower m WH 124.

Roller chain.

It's built of 200,000 board feet of long leaf yellow pine.

it's a gravity friction based brake system.

It's it's old and antiquated and excellent, as a lot of thing When you pull the two levers, it raises the track actual, ski pads on the bottom of the of the contacting friction slows down.

So it's just metal on meta and you're actually just picking up as it comes into the station everything's old school, no comp no nothing like that that that can fail with even hea It's not the fastest.

It's not the tallest.

It doesn't turn you upside down.

and it keeps you out of your sea Just enough to make it fun.

That you want to do it again, Lake Winnepesaukah is a family-owned and famil operated amusement and water par that has been in my family now for 100 years.

My great grandparents, Carl and Dixon, bought the property in 1924 with of making it a family recreation she did a great deal of researc in the history of Catoosa County So she wanted to pay tribute to the indigenous people who built the lake and found out that Winnepesaukah means beautifu lake of the highlands in Cheroke It first opened to the public in and the recreatio was literally swimming in the la in 1927, the boat chute opened I've been going to Lake Winnie all my life.

when I was a kid my parents would take me there.

my classic childhood.

That's where I fell in lov with theme parks, amusement park when we were young my brother and I would see the L Winnepesaukah sign on Ringgold R And if we made that turn, we were, like, looking at each o Could it be?

Could it be?

Not until we came down Page Road and went straight did we know of course, an explosion of excitement in th at that point Lake Winnepesaukah by gum This is the brochure from 67.

And it's the first brochure to feature the cannon ball The top of the 70ft incline prov a breathtaking.

View.

Of historic Chickamauga ba The cannon balls namesake.

That's me.

I grew up here, so it was home.

my first job was serving pickles for my grandmother The Cannon Ball was six years in the making I remember watching it outsid my bedroom window as a child and this is never gonna happe because just pouring the concret squares took months I didn't see anything happening.

But lo and behold, long about Ja it started happening.

I wanted to be the first one on it, but I wasn't al to be the first one on it.

watching them test it for what seemed like eternity with sandbags and dummies and so forth, was painful.

So not until day after the openi in 1967.

Was our finally allowed to ride cannonball, and I loved it from From the first ride.

I love this picture because I can't imagine anyone being here today in a sui you know, we could tear it down and put something new in there, maybe, you know, or whatever.

But we want to keep the history as long as possible.

You know?

a ride like that you have to walk the ride every every morning that that we open it, someone walks t and looks at every single boar foot of track you may be 70ft hi You might be close to the ground, you know, we can go get our own lumber, 20 two by eight and two by tens.

pick all that up down in, Armuc Georgia, you know, an hour and a the road, it' basically just stayed the same.

Staying the same is a good thing you know, adaptations or no changes in the way it operate Just try to get better.

what were originally doing.

keep all arms, legs and fee inside of the coaster at all tim People want to be taken to the point of danger and it not end up being dangerou of course They like to go as fas as they can.

They like to get their blood pum you know?

it's just a great wa just to let out some stress scre If you want to put up your arms and just have a good time.

maybe a perso can't be a skydiver or a rock cl but they can get on a ride and say they did it.

Families love traditions.

You've got grandparents, grandkids, maybe even great grandkids.

great grandkids.

To see them share something toge Not very many things at all, could you have three generations enjoy it.

we like to feel that we're par of the tradition for many famili parents tell us you know, that their child waits to be tall enough to ride and that it's gotten a lot of broccol and a lot of green beans and car children over the years, they kn if they eat their vegetables, they're going to grow more and able to ride the cannonball next the cannon ball was an entry poi for me to fall in love with roller coasters in general.

And now I'm able to share that l with my daughter.

we're always going to have that And I can thank Lake Winnie for A lot of folks around the country and around the worl come to Chattanooga to go to, li we need to ride that coaste because it's just, such a landma wooden roller coaster history without the cannon ball, you don't have the great America machine at Six Flags.

Over in Georgia, you don't have, Thunderhead at Dollywood.

I have a a reverenc I didn't have with, when it firs The joy in different families and bringing them together I don't see why I couldn't run another hundred years Lake Winnipesaukah is a place yo and exhale all your worries and all your troubles of the day and just breathe in a little bit