Grizzly

Seven years after Kings Dominion opened with the racing wooden coaster now known as Racer 75, the park wanted a rougher, more terrain-driven wood coaster to fill acreage in the still-developing Old Virginia section. Rather than commission an outside manufacturer, Kings Dominion had its own design team, led by engineer Curtis D. Summers, build Grizzly in-house, modeling its double-figure-eight layout directly on the Wildcat, a beloved wooden coaster that had operated at Cincinnati's Coney Island until its demolition in 1964 — a park the resort's then-parent company Taft Broadcasting had also once owned, making the tribute a fairly direct one.

Grizzly opened on March 27, 1982, billed at the time as taller and more intense than Racer, its 3,162 feet of track threading through dense forest with intentionally tight clearances between the structure and surrounding trees before opening into an infield turnaround. Philadelphia Toboggan Company supplied the trains, giving the ride a smoother experience than many of its wood-coaster contemporaries despite its aggressive, terrain-hugging layout.

Grizzly has needed periodic retracking to keep its ride quality up over more than four decades of Virginia summers, including partial closures in 2009 and 2011 and a more extensive rebuild of its first drop in the early 2020s that steepened the initial descent without altering the ride's original terrain-following route.

Enthusiast rankings and park regulars alike have long singled out Grizzly as one of Kings Dominion's best night rides, its darkened forest setting and abundant airtime hills giving it a different character after sundown than its daytime reputation as merely "one of the most popular attractions" suggests.