The Beast
— — four minutes of timber and dark.
Not only on a wall.
“The wooden roller coaster at the back of Kings Island, north of Cincinnati, that has been the longest wooden coaster in the world since it opened on 14 April 1979. Nearly seven and a half thousand feet of yellow pine track laid through 35 acres of second-growth Ohio woods, with two tunnels and a long helix that nobody can see into from the midway. Most of the ride is hidden in trees. A night run with the lights off is the one the regulars come back for, year after year.
The Beast, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Beast is a wooden roller coaster at Kings Island, an amusement park in Mason, Ohio, about 39 kilometres northeast of downtown Cincinnati. It was designed in-house by Kings Island's engineering team and opened to the public on 14 April 1979. The track is 2,243 metres long, the tallest drop is 41 metres, and the maximum recorded speed is 103 kilometres per hour. It remains the longest wooden roller coaster in the world more than four decades after opening, and it occupies 35 acres of wooded land at the rear of the park, away from the main midway.
The ride opens for the season with the rest of Kings Island in early April and runs through the Halloween event into late October. The annual Coasterstock weekend each May draws enthusiasts who ride The Beast in the dark with the park lights down, a tradition that began in the 1990s and remains the most-requested night session of the year. The trains were re-profiled in 2022 with Millennium Flyer rolling stock from the Great Coasters International shop, replacing the original Philadelphia Toboggan trains that ran the layout from opening day.
Kings Island is a 364-acre Cedar Fair park in Mason, in Warren County, reached by car from I-71 exit 25 about a thirty-minute drive from downtown Cincinnati. A single-day admission gives access to The Beast and around forty other rides. The queue for The Beast is at the southern back of the park, past Diamondback and the Banshee station. The four-minute, fifty-second ride time is the longest of any wooden coaster on Earth; the first lift hill climbs into the trees and the rest of the layout is largely invisible from the midway.