LEARNING CURVES. The last wooden-tracked Flying Turns roller coasters stopped running in the late 1960s as the urban amusement parks retrenched. (I believe the last two were at Cleveland's Euclid Beach and Chicago's Riverview Park.) Knoebels Grove have been working on a new one to the original plans (using the wood bobsled run, not the plastic run of Cedar Point's Disaster Transport or Blackpool's Avalanche). Sometimes, though, the plans don't tell you what the builders and the operators learned by building and operating the ride.

Unlike a traditional coaster, we didn’t have hundreds of working models to observe.

As we’ve worked through the project, we’ve learned more and more about the history of the Turns and the challenges this ride presented to those who ran and maintained them. We sure wish we could have known everything we now know at the beginning of the project. But even with all the research that had been done, we couldn’t know all that we do now because now, we’ve seen a train run in the trough. In fact, we’ve seen several variations of a train run in several variations of the trough.

The structure has been topped out, and Saturday a week ago a carpenter was at work on the lower track sections.


Knoebels previously built a scaled-down replica of the original Mister Twister from the original Elitch Gardens in Denver.

In scaling it down, they gave it a bit more punch.


I did ride the original, seventeen years ago, but don't recall quite as fast a ride as this one offers. Definitely worth a visit.