Silverwood: Still A Thrill Ride? After Stunning Two-Year Turnaround, General Manager Leaves North Idaho Amusement Park

All good roller coasters have an uphill climb before the fun starts.

Two years ago, Silverwood Theme Park was inching up the track. Attendance was flat. The number of Canadian tourists - once nearly a third of the park’s business - had slowed to a trickle.

Its location a dozen miles north of Coeur d’Alene made a trip for Spokane residents a serious commitment. After a half-dozen years of operation, the park wasn’t providing much return on owner Gary Norton’s multimillion-dollar investment.

The park’s season is short, its weather unpredictable, and the surrounding tourism economy has its share of struggling multimillion-dollar investments.

Bring it on, thought Dan Aylward, the just-departed general manager and president of the park. He’d seen worse.

In two years, Aylward orchestrated a remarkable turnaround. Silverwood had the largest attendance increase of any amusement park on the planet last year, pushing the park over the top with momentum to roll on for years.

“It’s really a paint-by-numbers business,” said Aylward, now working for a new animal-themed park in California. “If you know which colors go in the numbers, it’s really an easy business to be in. But if you don’t, this business can be very brutal.”

Regional appeal

It was a damp day in May 1995, and Aylward walked the neatly manicured grounds of Silverwood and talked about Coeur d’Alene being a suburb of Spokane.

To suggest that any business in North Idaho depends on Spokane for its livelihood doesn’t sit well with locals. But from the perspective of Aylward and marketing guru David Palmer, an amusement veteran who followed Aylward to the park, Spokane was the primary market.

Along with a intense local campaign, Palmer flooded radio stations in secondary markets like Missoula and the Tri-Cities with promotions.

Silverwood teamed with Burger King restaurants to tempt families with discounted passes. Inland Northwest television viewers couldn’t watch the tube without seeing the “Come Join the Fun” spots.

Marketing was just the first step. The operating numbers at Silverwood just didn’t add up. Much was out of whack for the park compared to the rest of the industry: the cost of selling food, the low price of concessions, the hours of the 425 seasonal workers.

Workers were shifted from less busy hours to peak times during the day. Food vendors and prices were changed.

The park built employee loyalty by giving medical benefits to family members. Employees received vacations and the park threw lake cruises and other events for seasonal workers.

Aylward and Palmer cultivated the existing staff, turning a receptionist into their leading group salesperson, for example. Promotions came from within whenever possible.

Despite attendance being lower than in the previous year, Silverwood made money in 1995. While remarkably more efficient, and featuring a nifty new ice show with world-class skaters, the park still needed an attention-grabber.

Wooden wonder

More than 300,000 board feet of yellow pine and fir frame the steel tracks of Silverwood’s rollercoaster, currently nameless because of a legal tiff over the trademarked name “The Grizzly.”

“The park still would have made money without it,” Aylward said. But it’s difficult to estimate the word-of-mouth buzz the coaster brought the park in 1996. Television news anchors cooed over it. Reviews from coaster enthusiasts reached across the country, which, ironically, roused the lawyers who started the name flap.

The 90-second, 55-mph ride has “airtime,” a coaster term referring to the sensation riders enjoy that feels like the coaster car floats over the tracks.

The coaster, the addition of new rides for children, plus a sweet season-pass deal for families combined to boost attendance 32 percent. As far as Aylward and the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions are concerned, that’s the biggest increase of any park, anywhere, last year.

“It’s much harder to do that in a park of that size,” said Michael Jenkins, president of Leisure & Recreation Concepts of Dallas, Texas, an amusement park consultant.

“In a big park, if you make a mistake, you can cover it up,” said Jenkins, who has known Aylward for more than 20 years. “In a smaller park, a mistake shows up like a big red thumb.”

Phenomenal numbers

What sticks out at Silverwood are the numbers. Season passes increased to more than 22,000 from just over 4,000 two years ago. Group sales increased threefold to more than 90,000, thanks to an aggressive new sales staff. Both Palmer and Aylward wouldn’t be surprised to see those numbers double again.

Owner Gary Norton’s willingness to let Aylward tinker with his park helped, said Lisa Hunnewell, of the association of amusement parks in Alexandria, Va.

“They both deserve the credit,” she said. “I don’t want to speak for Gary, but maybe his strength wasn’t in taking the park to the next level, and he needed a good leader to do that. It’s a credit to Gary to seek out someone like Dan and let him do what he did.”

Norton said Aylward set high standards for the park managers and taught him and the staff “the tricks of the trade.” The two parted amicably and Norton, for the time being, will run the park as he did before Aylward arrived.

“We’re going to go out and look for a new GM, but we’re not in a rush,” Norton said in a telephone interview last week. “We don’t have any real problems at this point.”

Norton said part of Aylward’s mission at Silverwood was to solicit offers to buy the park, and more than one established amusement company is interested in owning the place.

“I’m calling them all back and thanking them for their interest,” said Norton, who built the park from money made from selling his computer business, Spokane-based ISC, now owned by Olivetti. “I’m not interested in selling.”

No coaster-size additions are on tap for Silverwood this spring, but visitors will notice plenty of improvements. Food facilities will be enlarged, the ice show will have a new fairy tale theme, and much of the park’s infrastructure will be beefed up to handle the bigger crowds.

“We’re working on plans for a major expansion in the fall,” Norton said.

As for Aylward, it’s off to the next challenge. With nearly three decades in the business, his niche as amusement park resuscitator is well established. Parks around the world courted his services while he worked long hours at Silverwood. Marine World Africa USA in Vallejo, Calif., north of San Francisco, was the right fit, he said.

When he left a park in Detroit, it went bankrupt a year later. When he left a park in Tucson, Ariz., to come to North Idaho, the park neglected to maintain its fire suppression system and burned to the ground.

“That’s why I tell people they shouldn’t let me go,” he said.

Barring that kind of catastrophe, Silverwood’s future appears bright. Norton has plenty of room to expand parking and attractions. A contest at local Burger Kings will let the public rename the roller coaster.

“It’s a great park,” said Hunnewell in Virginia. “Other small parks don’t have the theming like Silverwood has. It’s unusual to see what’s happened there.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo