The Matterhorn Disneyland is a place for people of all ages and backgrounds. You go to Disneyland and get on all the rides that get you wetter than a fish and that make you feel like a bird in the open sky. You walk for endless hours and maybe for days if you stay on their luxurious hotels. You eat at their very expensive restaurants and buy at their also very expensive souvenir stores. You take a thousand pictures with a thousand poses that last you many precious years. Disneyland is one of a kind, yet there are many secrets hidden behind the theme park made by the imagination of Walter Elias Disney “Walt Disney.” Legend has it that there is a secret basketball court located inside Disneyland’s Matterhorn. Truth or fiction? That is true. Instead of a secret evil villain lair with shark tanks and stolen treasures, the secret room in the Disneyland Matterhorn is actually a half-court basketball court. The Matterhorn in Disneyland opened up in 1959. The Matterhorn in Disneyland is the scaled replica of the original Matterhorn in Zermatt, Switzerland. Walt made a visit to Europe in the 1950s. Instantly, Walt fell in love with the mountain, The Matterhorn. When Walt Disney got back from his trip he talked to his engineers and told them that they won’t be building the Rock Candy Mountain they had originally planned, but building the Matterhorn. Walt went to his imaginers and asked what to put in it, the imaginers came up with a roller coaster type attraction. The Matterhorn was the first steel tubular roller coaster in the world, and practically every roller coaster after the Matterhorn is built this way. There is a team of climbers in the climbing the Matterhorn to give their guest a real feeling of being in the real thing. This Matterhorn is well done, from the snow, and the structure of the mountain to the vegetation and tree on the bottom of it. Occasionally, even Mickey Mouse makes the climb up the Matterhorn. The Basketball court in the Matterhorn is restricted to only few or special guest. Tony Baxter, Senior Vice President of Creative Development of Walt Disney Imagineering, says that there was an empty space in the upper two-thirds of the mountain, and it needed to be filled with something. Walt Disney himself even gave the “OK” to build the basketball court in the Matterhorn. Walt talked to the climbers and the ride operators about what to put inside the empty space. Now the basketball court serves as a recreational place for the climbers. The size of the basketball court was about one-third court. Not only that, but it’s clearly an “improvised” board and hoop and is attached to the side of the stairs. Now the Matterhorn is officially classified as a gym and has a full basketball court inside. In 1984, it was even certified as an official Olympic Stadium. So the secret is no longer a secret, it is true that there is a basketball court at the top of the Matterhorn. Only a few workers and climbers get to see the Matterhorn’s basketball court. The court is not very big and it’s a loophole attached to the stairs. There are many secrets still to be proven to be true or false, but this one is true. When we visited the Matterhorn we asked several workers about the basketball court. When asked, every worker smiled and said yes they knew about the court, but only a select few said they have actually seen it. The workers that had visited it said that the court is not used much any more, it is more of a break room for the climbers of the
