Great Bear

Great Bear opened in 1998 as the first inverted coaster built anywhere in Pennsylvania, arriving just a few years after Bolliger & Mabillard had introduced the format at Six Flags Magic Mountain's Batman: The Ride. Rather than sit inside a floored car, riders' feet hang freely beneath the track through all four of the ride's inversions, a sensation that was still relatively novel to East Coast audiences at the time.

The layout was deliberately routed to interact with its surroundings rather than run through open space: the 124-foot drop crosses directly above Spring Creek, and several turns weave close to nearby structures and rides in the Kissing Tower Hill area. That routing gives Great Bear a sense of density and proximity that many open-field inverted coasters of the same era lack.

Now more than a quarter-century old, Great Bear remains one of the smoothest-riding coasters in the park thanks to B&M's precise, low-maintenance track engineering, and it continues to serve as a reliable, consistently well-regarded classic even as taller, faster coasters have opened around it.