Meet Mike – The 10,000 Mile Man

Here at Valleyfair, we pride ourselves on providing the best guest experience possible, so it is always cause for excitement when guests return year after year out of love for the park. No one better encompasses this than Minnesota resident Mike Cameron, who is a long-time Valleyfair goer. Mike is a well-known face to multi-season associates and full-time staff alike here in the park, and there is a perfect reason for that.

Mike has spent over a decade as a season passholder at the park. He is a roller coaster and thrill ride enthusiast who keeps meticulous count of just how often he not only visits the park but of how often he rides his favorite coasters. Now, while he is fond of both Excalibur and Steel Venom and has a soft spot for Power Tower and Xtreme Swing, his true passion lies with Renegade.

The Renegade is our newest coaster, having joined the park in 2007, which is when Mike took his first ride on opening day in the first train to touch its tracks. Since that day he has been keeping track of every ride he has taken on Renegade, and this season on opening day, he finally reached the long-awaited milestone of 10,000 miles on its track. To put that into context, Mike has visited the park 746 times, ridden for 565 hours, has covered 52,807,706 feet of track, and has ridden the ride itself 16,962 times as of 5/22/21.

Now, you might be asking yourself, how did this all start? Well, when he rode Renegade for the first time on opening day, it was his first experience on a GCI (Great Coasters International) coaster, and it, almost literally, "blew [him] away!" So, he decided to keep track of how many trips he had taken on the wooden coaster from then on.

Mike considered himself a relatively normal passholder before 2011, but something changed at the end of that season. He realized that he had ridden the Renegade the most times that year out of any of the previous years he'd had a season pass (a whopping 242 times). When he came back in 2012, he decided he wanted to break that record. He says that, from there, it "snowballed out of control."

By 2015 Mike had reached 5,000 rides, but he knew he could do better. He realized that 2017 would mark the 10th anniversary of the Renegade, and he resolved to get to 10,000 rides by then. On July 15, 2017, he hit his goal, and since then, he hasn't stopped upping his game. His record for the highest number of rides in a single day is 100 from July 22, 2016. Mike estimates that, at this point, 80-90% of his time in the park is spent on Renegade.

So how does he do it? Well, Mike has it down to a science. Every year he gets a season pass, a meal plan, and a Fast Lane pass. He tries to visit every day in the on-season, including workdays. Mike works just down the road from Valleyfair, and on lunch breaks, he comes in, rides the Renegade, grabs lunch at the Minnesota Eats building, then heads back to work. More often than not, he returns to the park at the end of the workday and stays until close as well.

It isn't often we meet an individual who has as much passion for coasters as we do, but Mike certainly fits the bill! Of course, despite loving the rides, Mike asserts that the best part of this continuous journey has been the many friends he's made along the way. From associates to other season passholders to daily ticket holders, Mike has met many lovely individuals who have taken an interest in his passion. If you'd like to follow his journey, check out @RenegadeMike on Twitter!