The History of Twisted Timbers

For its first twenty-two years, this corner of Kings Dominion's Candy Apple Grove belonged to a wooden coaster called Hurler. In 2018 it came back as something new. Twisted Timbers takes the old wooden bones and lays modern steel over them, and it opens with a drop that turns you upside down.

From Hurler to Twisted Timbers

Hurler opened in 1994, themed to the Wayne's World films and billed as the first movie-themed wooden coaster in the United States. At its preview that April, Wayne and Garth impersonators and actress Tia Carrere rode along. It had an identical twin at Carowinds, and for years the two ran on either side of the Carolinas border. But the Kings Dominion Hurler grew rough, and after the 2015 season it closed.

The park had fun burying it. In late 2016 it posted a video of a gravestone reading "Hurler 1994 to 2016, Rest In Peace, For Now," ending on the year 2018. A summer-long teaser followed, each clue hiding an upside-down letter T. On National Roller Coaster Day in August 2017, the park confirmed it: Rocky Mountain Construction would convert Hurler into a steel hybrid called Twisted Timbers, reusing much of the original wooden structure.

The ride

Designed by RMC's Alan Schilke, Twisted Timbers stands 111 feet tall and drops 109 feet, but the drop is the trick. It is a barrel roll, so the train inverts on the way down. From there it runs low and fast through three inversions, three overbanked turns, and roughly twenty moments of airtime across a course that hugs the ground the way the old Hurler did. It opened in March 2018 as the first Rocky Mountain Construction coaster at any Cedar Fair park, and took third place for best new ride of the year in the industry's Golden Ticket Awards. The theme reimagines the site as an abandoned apple orchard, Hanover Hill, frozen in time by some unexplained force.

One thing to know

Its first drop is a barrel roll, so the train turns completely upside down on the way down.

Twisted Timbers is one chapter in the fifty-year history of Kings Dominion.

Twisted Timbers at a glance