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Blair County’s Leap-the-Dips roller coaster is one of a kind, say fans of the 123-year-old wooden ride.
“I heard it once said that it was like a rolling sofa, and I would have to agree with that,” Pittsburgh-area resident Dave Hahner told PA Local.
After climbing 41 feet in a two-row car with just metal bars to hold onto, riders coast up and down little hills on a figure-eight-shaped track. The ride travels at about 10 miles per hour, but a now-uncommon type of engineering allows the cars to “pop off the track just a little bit,” said Hahner, who serves as historian for the nonprofit American Coaster Enthusiasts (ACE). Hence the coaster’s name.
But for now, riders can only experience those special leaps and dips in retrospect.
Leap-the-Dips hasn’t operated since 2023, as Lakemont Park, home of the coaster, decided to keep all its rides closed this year and last due to financial concerns. Fans have no clue if it will come back, as the county-owned and privately operated park is now more focused on offering activities like mini golf over rides.
PA Local sent questions about the coaster’s status to Lakemont Park’s front office, and received no response.
Love for the attraction, which was the oldest-operating roller coaster in the world as of 2023 according to the National Amusement Park Historical Association, remains strong even as it sits in limbo.
Roller coaster fan Josh Brown said the one-minute ride is a multisensory event. “You can smell the grease,” Brown, an Ohioan who serves as ACE’s history and preservation director, told PA Local. “You can smell the wood.”
Many treasure it as both an experience and a piece of Pennsylvania history.
“I think there is a certain sense of urgency to come up with a viable plan to keep this as an operating asset and a Blair County treasure,” said Jim Futrell, historian for the National Amusement Park Historical Association. “It's been there for over 120 years. I mean, it would be tragic for something to happen to it.”
A special design
The coaster’s charm stems from both its design and its rarity.
E. Joy Morris, an engineer for the Philadelphia Toboggan Company, designed and built Leap-the-Dips in 1902 for Lakemont Park, a former picnic area.
At the time, the coaster wasn’t unique among its peers. Its signature figure-eight shape was “kind of the standard roller coaster back around the turn of the 20th century,” Futrell said.
Its “side-friction” technology was also typical for the time. A side-friction coaster’s cars have two sets of wheels, Futrell explained: one on the bottom to roll along the track, and another on the side to keep the coaster on track during turns.
What side-friction coasters lack, however, is a mechanism for locking cars to the track when they’re going up and down hills. Those brief moments of detachment help create the Leap-the-Dips’ bouncy feeling.
While the front row offers a “nice, gentle joy ride,” said coaster lover Charles Kesil, the back seat makes the rider leap along with the vehicle, catching air and “slam[ming] back into your seat” at the bottom of each hill.
Kesil has twice driven four-plus hours from his home in New Jersey to visit the free-admission Blair County park.
Leap-the-Dips happened to be closed for the day during his first visit to Lakemont, but when he returned, he rode the coaster three times — once in the front row, and twice in the back (because it was just that good).
“It’s just — it has that classic feel,” he said. “Compare it to coasters today that were designed with computers and feel like they’re precise.” Leap-the-Dips, “he explained, is the product of the “human brain” and “trial and error.”
Over the years, amusement parks have largely abandoned side-friction coasters like Leap-the-Dips.
According to Futrell, “under-friction” roller coasters, which have a third set of wheels beneath the track that keep the train fixed to it, debuted decades after Leap-the-Dips and became an industry standard. Some side-friction roller coasters can still be found in a few places across the world, but Leap-the-Dips is the only one in the Western Hemisphere, he said.
“It really is an irreplaceable connection to the industry’s past,” Futrell told PA Local.
Leap-the-Dips is also a piece of Pennsylvania’s unique roller coaster and amusement park history.
In the 19th century, present-day Jim Thorpe was home to the Mauch Chunk Gravity Railroad, the inspiration for Coney Island’s famous “Switchback Railway,” a seminal roller coaster.
Decades later, when amusement parks came into vogue, Pennsylvania had many — more than any other state until the 1960s, per Futrell, who lives outside Pittsburgh.
Even today, Pennsylvania has more wooden roller coasters than any other state, according to ACE’s Brown. National and global lists of the oldest surviving coasters are littered with Pennsylvania entries, like the Jack Rabbit at Kennywood. Built in 1920, it’s the oldest operating roller coaster in the state and second-oldest in the country.
“We would like it to make it the third-oldest operating in the country, [when we get] Leap-the-Dips open again,” Hahner, the ACE historian, said of the Jack Rabbit. “No offense to Kennywood, because I’m good friends with them.”
A rickety future
When Lakemont Park announced last year that it wouldn’t be opening its rides for the season, the company that runs it pointed to diminishing attendance and high insurance costs, according to reporting in the Altoona Mirror. Instead of offering $3 roller coaster rides and $8 Go Kart rentals, the park decided to pivot to a model where batting cages, mini golf, and basketball courts are the main attractions. The rides stayed closed through the 2025 season.
Anxiety about the park’s future prompted Kesil to launch a petition to raise awareness about Leap-the-Dips’ situation, as well as that of Skyliner, Lakemont’s other historic coaster. Over 1,500 people have signed it.
“If they lose their coasters — especially Leap-the-Dips — I feel like they’re going to lose their most prized possession,” Kesil told PA Local. “Those are what attract people from outside the Altoona area … being from New Jersey, I would have never known about [Lakemont Park] if they didn’t have Leap-the-Dips and Skyliner.”
Per The Mirror, the county solicitor said in 2024 that the operator’s lease with the county requires it to maintain Leap-the-Dips and make sure it doesn’t “fall down.”
But Dave Kessling, president of the Blair County Commissioners, has previously voiced concern that the park’s assets are deteriorating, and said “it doesn’t seem that there’s any movement to do any repairs” due to high maintenance costs.
In June, WTAJ reported that the county commissioners are in ongoing discussions with the park’s operators about its future, including the possibility of adding another operator.
Neither Lakemont Park’s front office nor Kessling responded to interview requests from PA Local.
Leap-the-Dips has been idled and revived before.
Newspaper archives show that Lakemont Park changed hands several times over the decades and saw varying levels of success. Leap-the-Dips was shut down in 1985 and fell into disrepair in subsequent years — an estimated $1.3 million worth, per a 1995 Patriot-News article.
Coaster fans — including ACE — and locals embarked on a multiyear fundraising and restoration campaign, and got the ride designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1996. It reopened on Memorial Day 1999. (Futrell, the NAPHA historian, was there.)
Whether another rebound is in the coaster’s future remains to be seen.
Brown said ACE has met with Lakemont Park “a number of times,” and Hahner noted the organization is ready to contribute more preservation funds for Leap-the-Dips if the park manages to make it operational again.
“They know what they have. They understand the history,” Brown said of the operators. “We just need somebody that is interested in trying to operate the attractions and invest a little money in it to get Lakemont back open.”
Kesil, the petitioner from New Jersey, hopes to see the classic coaster revitalized so that people can once again experience the distinct joys of side-friction coasters.
“I’ll never forget my first ride on it, and how unique it felt,” he said. “I just wanna tell people to go out to this place, because it is such a unique experience. It’s just something unforgettable, in my opinion.”