Jurassic Park River Adventure

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What It Is
Indoor-outdoor adventure river-raft ride
Our Rating

Current Wait Time
Park is closed

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Appeal By Age
Based our reader surveys. See our Ratings and Research page for details.
Grade School
Teens
Young Adults
Over 30
Seniors

Touring Info
Loading speed	Fast
Wait per 100 people ahead	5.0 minutes
When to go Before 11 a.m.

General Info
Location	Jurassic Park
Opening Date	May 28, 1999
Duration	9 minutes
Scope and Scale	Headliner
Closures / Refurbishments

Inaccurate/stale data?
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Description And Comments

One of IOA's original headliner attractions, Jurassic Park River Adventure is inspired by a scene in Michael Crichton's original Jurassic Park novel. In the River Adventure, guests board tour boats for an aquatic through the grounds of Jurassic Park. Everything is tranquil as the tour begins, as the boat floats among large herbivorous dinosaurs such as ultrasaurus and stegosaurus, along with prehistoric-looking plants and the occasional geyser.

To no one's surprise, something goes horribly wrong, and your tour boat is nudged off course by a dinosaur at exactly the most inopportune time: just as you're floating past the vicious raptor enclosure, whose gates have been mysteriously unlocked and left open. Before you have time to ask what OSHA's inspectors really do during the day, your boat is climbing through the inside of the raptor facility amid the destruction and carnage wrought by the escaped animals. Your first face-to-face encounter with a T-Rex is also your last, as you find rescue by plunging 85 feet (the tallest such drop in Florida, and a world record when it was built) into the river below.

The drop is a doozy; the scenery, background music and ride narration are all done well; and Jurassic Park River Adventure is overall one of the more immersive attractions in the entire resort. But the dinosaurs are fewer in number than at this ride's California cousin, and those it has look increasing arthritic, despite repeated refurbishments of their faded skins.

Touring Tips

This attraction offers Universal Express.
This attraction has a Single Rider line that operates at Universal's discretion).

Riders don't get as wet on River Adventure as they do on Popeye & Bluto's Bilge-Rat Barges or Dudley Do-Right's Whipsaw Falls. Though the boats make a huge splash at the bottom of the 85-foot drop, you can stay relatively dry if you are sitting in an interior seat; sitting behind a larger person and keeping your arms down can help. Still, bring a poncho or plastic bag if you want to keep as dry as possible; paid lockers are located inside the queue. There's a viewing area to the left of the ride's final, big drop, where you can see how wet riders are getting, before you decide to ride.

A Honolulu reader thinks Jurassic Park doesn't pass the smell test:

The Jurassic Park ride is a lot of fun—so fun, in fact, that you won't realize how truly HEINOUS the water that drenches you during the climactic splashdown is until much later. We sat in the front row for the ride and got soaked. Three hours later, my girlfriend and I realized we reeked.

Young children must endure a double whammy on this ride. First, they're stalked by giant, salivating sometimes spitting) reptiles, and then they're sent catapulting over the falls. Unless your children are fairly hardy, wait a year or two before you spring the River Adventure on them.

Because the Jurassic Park section of IOA is situated between to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and Skull Island, the boats may experience heavy crowds earlier in the day. Try to ride before 11 a.m.

Jurassic Park River Adventure Wait Times

This chart shows you roughly how long you'll wait for Jurassic Park River Adventure when you visit on a day with a given Universal's Islands of Adventure Crowd Level. The blue bars represent the average "peak" wait time (that is, how long the line will be at its busiest). The bottom and top black lines represent the range of peak wait times to expect (for you fellow nerds out there: it's the 5th percentile and 95th percentile of peak wait times). Please note that these are estimates, and for a better forecast for your travel dates, see Jurassic Park River Adventure Wait Times.