Camp Jurassic is a kids’ playspace within the larger Jurassic Park section of Universal’s Islands of Adventure. It would be easy to overlook, and in my mind, that’s a mistake because this highly themed area is a ton of fun to explore.
Camp Jurassic is off the main path. You head through an archway, over a bridge and past the line up for the Pteranodon Riders, to get to the Camp Jurassic play space.
Pterodon Riders takes an aerial view of this section of Jurassic Park. You need to be under 56 inches to board. It’s a kiddie ride, which adults can only go on if they are accompanying a youth.
I mention Pterodon Riders only to point out that if you only have older kids (or no kids at all) you may not turn off the main path to head towards this ride and could easily overlook this part of the park. Which would be a mistake, because exploring Camp Jurassic is so much fun.
My girls loved playing at Camp Jurassic. The nine year old was happy to run off on her own, climb every tower and check out every viewpoint. The six year old prefered dragging me around as she explored each nook and cranny. It ended up being her favourite park of the entire theme park. She loved looking at dinosaur “fossils”, taking part in a water gun fight, climbing towers and walking under waterfalls.
Unless you go out of your way to avoid it, your children will get wet. There are built-in water guns to be found and an area with a small splash pad. There are also built-in binoculars to discover, and caves to explore. There are lots of places to climb, plenty of neat look out towers, cargos nets, and slides. It’s just a generally fantastic place to run, play and be a kid.
I will note, parts of the caves are dark, with bat sound effects, or dinosaur sounds — this scared the pants off of my kids. There were also speakers in the trees on the other side of the fence surrounding parts of the area, that were doing a good job of making it sound like there were dinosaurs, breathing, stomping, roaring dinosaurs, just out of sight. After one good scare, my kids refused to go anywhere near the perimeter unless I accompanied them.
Other than the (extremely minor) fear factor, this was a great place to let the kids run free for a bit. However, I feel, if you just grab a seat somewhere and let the children do all of the exploring you’re missing out.
Even if you don’t have kids with you Camp Jurassic is worth a look. While I didn’t want to climb up on the cargo nets and suspension bridges, I did enjoy walking through the caves. My personal favourite was the amber mine, which had big chunks of glowing amber with, of course, bits of flora and fauna stuck inside. There is actually quite a lot to explore and discover in this highly themed area. (Also the caves are shady and cool on a hot sunny day…. Just saying).
Once we were back at home I watched a “playthrough” of Camp Jurassic that someone posted on YouTube and realised we had somehow missed entire sections of caverns. So not only does this place top my kids’ list of “things we want to do again”, I now want to go back in there just to look for the caves that we missed. We will definitely be spending some time at Camp Jurassic next time we visit Universal Orlando.
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