For over 10 years now, the Yeti animatronic in Expedition Everest at Disney’s Animal Kingdom has been immobile. The figure broke roughly around 2008 and Disney has been unable to fix the highly advanced audio-animatronic without doing any major structural work to the man-made Asian mountain. With Everest as the park’s headliner attraction for most of the last decade, Disney felt uncomfortable closing the ride down for 6 or more months to fix the problem and return the Yeti’s range of motion. With Pandora: The World of AVATAR now open, it seems Walt Disney Imagineering is getting ready to scale Everest and bring back one of the most impressive ride scenes ever created.

No exact timeframe has been given for the project, but publicly Joe Rohde has again stated that the problem will be fixed:

Internal sources have also told us that they are personally working on “the Everest project”, so the lengthy refurbishment and all of the changes it will bring are clearly in development and the closure is imminent. What other “plusses” to the ride that may occur are unknown, but the broken Yeti will certainly be the focus of the multi-month project when it begins.

We will of course keep you up to date on this story as more information becomes available.