I’m standing in a darkened cavern in the heart of Santa Cruz that looks and feels like a deserted mine shaft. The distant patter of morning rainfall is echoing overhead, the air smells faintly of musty lumber and motor oil, and I’m halfway expecting a teenage vampire with a blond mullet to come thundering around the corner on his motorcycle, admonishing me for trespassing into his secret lair. 

Instead, Marshall Wade, one of the six coaster mechanics for the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, gestures toward the mouth of the tunnel on the other side. A burst of light reveals a wooden trackway that climbs nearly 80 feet up toward the gray sky before suddenly plummeting down a dizzying drop, leaving the hearts in the throats of those who are brave enough to jump aboard.  

Wade is one of very few people to ever enter this tunnel on foot as he carefully scrutinizes every inch of the attraction's path. While dealing with extreme heights isn’t exactly his favorite part of the gig he’s had for the past three years, he’s come to recognize it as something that just comes with the territory. “I’ve been a mechanic my whole life,” he said. “Before this, I’d never done it in the air.”

He arrives for work at 6 a.m. each morning to inspect California’s oldest surviving roller coaster, the Giant Dipper, a national landmark that’s arguably the most popular ride on the boardwalk and celebrating its 100th birthday this weekend. With its double-out-and-back design, 180-degree turns, and 2,700-foot-long trackway rising and falling over the beach, the ride has provided a spectacular backdrop for countless movies from Joel Schumacher’s 1980s cult favorite “The Lost Boys” to Jordan Peele’s 2019 blockbuster “Us.” For coming-of-age locals, it’s a rite of passage. For amusement park enthusiasts, it’s a symbol of the golden age of roller coasters. For just about every visitor, it’s the first and last ride they want to go on when they spend an afternoon at the boardwalk. 

Keeping the Giant Dipper running for 10 decades has been no small feat. Trains fashioned out of fiberglass and steel need to be repainted and reassembled. Each piece — the chassis, the body, the axel and the lap bar of every car — is meticulously examined for wear and tear.

And heights aren’t the only obstacle. All hired coaster mechanics at the boardwalk go through a rigorous training regimen, familiarizing themselves with the various processes for every repair and aspect of ride operation for at least a year before they can work unsupervised. The first thing they learn? How not to get hurt.

“My biggest fear is losing a finger,” Wade said. “Thankfully, that hasn’t happened yet.” 

Coaster mechanics have to master a specific way to navigate through the station and along the trackway to prevent stumbling, and when boardwalk staff show me where I need to step, I can’t help but feel like Paul Atreides trying to avoid a run-in with a sandworm. They also have to be keenly aware of their surroundings, keeping their hands and toes out from beneath the train with their eyes peeled for hazardous areas. “We’re checking bolts, making sure nails aren’t coming up,” he said. “There is a spot where a car can come down and get you if you’re not paying attention.” Notably, the Giant Dipper has no brakes outside of the station, so when a train is making its descent, mechanics really have one option — get the hell out of the way. 

“Some guys have had close calls,” he said. “Generally, it comes down to knowing where the train is on the track so I have time to do what I need to do before it comes. You can’t miscalculate.”

It’s also well-known among coaster mechanics that they may have to dodge a flying object or two when entering the basement, which holds the ride’s in-house repair shop. The door faces out toward the Giant Dipper’s notorious fan turn, and Wade has seen just about everything — hats, earrings, cellphones, wallets, purses, change — fall from the ride. “There’s lots of vape pens. One time, there was an off-duty police officer who dropped his gun,” Wade said. Famously, mechanics once came across a wayward glass eyeball. “If it’s in your pockets, it’s coming out.” 

Most repairs are pretty standard — replacing broken planks of wood, loose bolts or nails. But others can be time-intensive, and with long lines of customers waiting to get into the park on weekends, the pressure is on to get the job done as quickly as possible. 

“Once, the belt broke,” Wade said. A pregnant pause. He stared off into the distance. “I broke it.” 

Wade had forgotten to check the tensioner at the end of his shift, which applies pressure to the massive, synthetic leather band that operates kind of like a bike chain to keep the motor spinning smoothly. The next day, about 30 minutes before the boardwalk opened to the public, the ride operator turned the Giant Dipper’s motor on, and the belt “just burnt up,” he said. It took about two hours for the mechanics on duty to remove it from the 12-foot-diameter wheel at the base of the lift hill, and when they were finished, they were covered head to toe in a thick layer of grease. 

Yet, the nuances of the job feel exciting to Wade. From the age of 5, he’d go out on his dad’s commercial fishing boat to look for halibut, crab and sand dabs off the coast of Half Moon Bay where he grew up. At a certain point, he was expected to figure out how to think on the fly and quickly fix something while out on the water without parts or tools nearby. “I found it to be real fun to get creative and figure out how to get home,” he said. 

For years, he worked as a hydraulic or fluid power mechanic, mostly taking jobs at construction and mining sites. Once, he performed maintenance work on the doors to the rhino enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo. But growing up going to the boardwalk as a kid and eventually taking his own children there, he never expected he would someday be watching over its landmark attraction. 

“It sounds funny, but I’ve come to realize I really like hearing kids scream,” he said with a laugh. “Every day, when the first train leaves for the Giant Dipper, they scream down the tunnel the whole way. I know they’re having fun, and you know the hard work is paying off.” 

One day while fixing the track about two years ago, he felt what he thought was the telltale rumble of an oncoming train and jumped to get out of the way, only to realize none of them were in operation. Then it dawned on him: The track was trembling due to a small earthquake. The ride, he said, is built to weather these kinds of tremors; it withstood the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake despite the epicenter being just a few miles away. At the time, inspectors shut down the ride for a month and conducted an extensive review of nearly every bolt and nail, ultimately failing to find any damage.  

“Do I think it would survive the Big One?” he said. “I do. I really do.”  

‘That wicked ride’ 

May 17, 1924. It was three years after Highway 17, the critical artery that brought droves of tourists from the Bay Area to Santa Cruz, had been paved with concrete. The first feature-length film with sound, “The Jazz Singer,” was still three years away from hitting theaters. 

The Santa Cruz Boardwalk was thriving, and long lines of cars would travel to the beach to see the earliest iterations of the Miss California pageants, take a whirl on the Looff carousel, and thrill themselves with the Plunge Water Carnivals held in the park’s indoor pool where the Neptune’s Kingdom arcade stands today. In a bid to draw even more tourists, Santa Cruz Mayor Fred W. Swanton extolled his city and boardwalk as “the land of a thousand wonders.”

That spring, 150,000 feet of lumber had been delivered by railroad cars to one end of the boardwalk near the skating rink. Each plank of wood was painstakingly dipped in white or red paint before the swift construction project began, costing $50,000 and reportedly lasting only 47 days. Anticipation grew as the skeletal structure slowly came into formation, towering over everything else in the park. 

The day the Giant Dipper opened to the public, two speed boats filled with tourists arrived from San Francisco. Famed street vendor Henry “Hot Dog” Miller ordered an electric organ to add a festive air to his popular concession near the entrance to the colonnade. Flowers decorated the boardwalk, and the bitter aroma of fresh hot coffee wafted over the park for several hours as thousands waited in line until one in the morning, paying 15 cents apiece for their first ride on the roller coaster that planner Arthur Looff described as “a combination earthquake, balloon ascension and aero plane ride.” 

It held up to his promise. The second riders left the station, they plummeted through a pitch-black tunnel and made a tight turn before the ominous clickety-clack of the lift hill carried them up ever so slowly up toward the clouds. At the top, they took in a fleeting panoramic view of Monterey Bay and pelicans gliding past them at eye level. Then came the first drop, sending them careening 55 mph down, down, down before racing up and over a series of hills, twists and turns that lifted them out of their seats. 

“I know I’ll never be the same in this life,” one rider told the Santa Cruz Evening News at the time.

“See that gray hair?” said another, removing his hat. “I got that during that wicked ride.” 

In the wake of the popularity of Coney Island, which is credited for spawning what would become known as the golden age of roller coasters, over a thousand amusement parks launched across the United States, each one hoping to have the highest, tallest, fastest thrill ride of its own. 

The Giant Dipper, designed by Tom Prior and Frederick Church, drew its inspiration from an attraction a little closer to home — the Big Dipper wooden roller coaster, which they dreamed up with the oversight of Looff at Playland-at-the-Beach in San Francisco just two years prior. The partners had patented the pinnacle of roller coaster technology at the time by taking an existing underfriction wheel design that prevented the train from jumping off the track and created a new kind of two-seater car with articulated couplings that used a ball-and-socket joint for easier movement. They were named “bobs” for their resemblance to bobsleds, and paired with Looff’s innovative track system, they made for more daring roller coasters with sharper turns that took up less space. When Looff left his position as an operator of the Ocean Beach park in 1923, he approached Prior and Church about bringing the concept down to Santa Cruz. 

“I presume he knew what he had in San Francisco and knew how to make it a little better,” said Ted Whiting, a local historian who has spent his entire life working for the boardwalk, starting at his family’s concession stand as a boy. He now periodically leads guests on behind-the-scenes tours of attractions including the Giant Dipper and recalls the boardwalk’s relationship with Playland in San Francisco, initially known as Chutes at the Beach. 

“Back then, if there was a game or ride Playland put in that was popular, we would go up and look at it, then put the same one in at the boardwalk,” he said. While he’s never been able to corroborate it, he has a hunch that the Sandae his family developed — a confection made of ice cream sandwiched between two graham crackers, dipped in chocolate and rolled in crushed almonds — was an attempt to replicate the success of Playland’s It’s-Its.

There was nothing more sought-out than the Giant Dipper at the time, except for maybe Dante’s Inferno, a dark ride billed as “A Trip to Hades” that was the boardwalk’s highest-grossing on weekdays. That was probably because it offered something a roller coaster could not: a place for teenage couples to be alone, away from the crowds, and unseen. 

Still, the Giant Dipper captured the attention of everyone from horror icon Vincent Price, who filmed scenes on the ride for the 1978 roller coaster documentary “America Screams,” to Clint Eastwood, who used it during the climactic finale of his 1983 neo-noir thriller “Sudden Impact.” Even Disney’s team of Imagineers allegedly scouted the roller coaster and surrounding boardwalk prior to the construction of Disney California Adventure, which opened in 2001, utilizing both as inspiration for the waterfront section of the park now known as Pixar Pier, which also has a carousel and a landmark roller coaster that happens to top out at the same maximum speed of 55 mph.

Whiting said he’ll never forget his first ride on the Giant Dipper as a child: the speed at which the roller coaster took off, the disorientation he felt as he shot through the dark tunnel with the wind blowing through his hair, and the foreboding look of the first hill that seemed twice as high as it really was. 

“There were no height requirements back then,” he said. “So if your parents thought you were big enough to ride, you rode.”

One original relic remains 

Beneath the Giant Dipper is an underground warehouse spanning about two-thirds of the entire length of the boardwalk itself. It’s a winding maze of narrow hallways lined with bags of giant stuffed animals waiting to be won in midway games and stacks of cups for soda and ice cream. Aging signs hawk everything from pretzels to the 1992 launch of the dismantled roller coaster the Hurricane; and hidden just beyond sight is one that inexplicably proclaims “NO BOUNCING” in bold letters. 

“I can still get lost in the underbelly of the place sometimes,” Karl Rice, the president of Santa Cruz Seaside Company, tells me as we venture on. His great-great-grandfather decided to construct the facility in the 1960s, enabling the boardwalk to grow and expand with more attractions than it ever had before. “I think about him every time I walk through here.” 

This is the maintenance basement — essentially a sprawling linoleum office for the technical services team of carpenters, painters and electricians who oversee each repair for all of the rides, the Giant Dipper included. Every nook and cranny is packed with miscellaneous tools and parts, and when we round the corner, we come face to face with rows and rows of lumber made of Southern yellow pine shipped in from Georgia: teeth and bones waiting to be swapped in to the Giant Dipper. 

The attraction saw three fatalities in its early years, the most recent in 1972. All three riders reportedly stood up while the coaster was in motion and were thrown from their seats. Over its century of existence, most of the roller coaster has been extensively refurbished, getting new trains with fewer cars and better restraints, and staff replace boards all the time to ensure the structural integrity of the ride.   

But one part of the Giant Dipper, save for its iconic silhouette, has never changed. Just across the catwalk lies the beating heart of the attraction: the motor room. 

Inside the cramped space is the contraption that pulls the train up the lift hill, using the large and cumbersome belt-and-wheel mechanism coaster mechanic Wade brought up earlier. He opens a cabinet-like furnishing to reveal the original switchboard for the ride. It’s just for display, but it’s the very same one used by staff at the turn of the century. 

It’s not the only unusual component hidden within the serpentine structure of the roller coaster. Most riders don’t know that tucked away in a crevice behind the fan turn is an open-air break room where employees get some respite from the crowds during shifts. There’s a restroom, a couple of picnic tables, a wall of lockers, a microwave on a shelf propped up over a water fountain, and a vending machine filled with chips and cookies, but cans of soda are noticeably absent. Too fizzy, I’d imagine: On a busy day, the train rushes by every two minutes, rattling the walls.

‘Controlled terror’ 

One man has ridden at least 400 roller coasters around the world, but calls the Giant Dipper his “favorite roller coaster of all time.” Nicholas Laschkewitsch, a theme park engineer and documentary filmmaker doing contract work for clients like Disney Parks and Universal Studios, is also one of the leaders of the NorCal chapter of American Coaster Enthusiasts, which recognized the Giant Dipper as one of its landmark coasters in 2007.  

Growing up 15 miles south of the boardwalk, Laschkewitsch has been going on the ride since the age of 6 and fondly remembers numerous childhood attempts to reconstruct it on the computer game “Roller Coaster Tycoon.” He talks with a passion about what makes the attraction thrilling: the lateral g-forces that push your body from side to side, the “controlled terror” of the first drop, the way it picks up speed depending on how many people are on it and how many times it’s raced along the track that day. But it’s the location of the Giant Dipper that really strikes him — there’s nothing like looking up at the roller coaster on a foggy night as the chaser lights dotting the outline of the ride pulse in the darkness over the crashing waves. 

“Especially in California, there were so many seaside amusement parks along the coast,” he said. “The fact that the Santa Cruz Boardwalk is the last of two in the state makes it that much more special.” 

It’s stood the test of time amid the increasing shift to steel roller coasters and competing forms of entertainment in an online era, even working in tandem with them on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, where swaths of enthusiasts release videos weighing the pros and cons of various roller coasters, detailing defunct amusement parks, and vlogging about their favorite rides in real time. When Laschkewitsch considers the future of the Giant Dipper, especially in the eyes of a younger generation, he thinks it’s only going to become even more of an icon. 

“It has that classic feel and nostalgia that people are hungry for,” he said. “I think there’s real value to that and it’s really important to still have that connection to the heritage of how we got to where we are today.”

The last ride at the boardwalk to achieve a centennial anniversary milestone was the Looff carousel. That was back in 2011, when Laschkewitsch was 17, and he celebrated by taking it for a spin 100 times in a single day, corn dog in hand. It was a stunt that took 12 hours on the same horse, and he said he joked to press at the time that he practiced by spinning around in an office chair at home. When it was all over, boardwalk staff presented him with a makeshift plaque on a piece of wood from the Giant Dipper. “I was sore for a week,” he said.

Laschkewitsch plans to be in attendance at the Giant Dipper’s 100-year-anniversary celebration this Saturday, which promises a “once-in-a-lifetime fireworks show,” a fan art contest, and $1 rides on the roller coaster, with the first 100 people in line to receive a commemorative souvenir cup. He hopes to honor the Giant Dipper in a way that’s just as memorable as the Looff carousel marathon, but after much deliberation, he and boardwalk staff determined he could not ride the roller coaster 100 times “for health reasons.” I get it: Riding four times over the course of one gloomy afternoon with raindrops pelting my face with such ferocity they felt like machine gun fire may or may not have given me a minor bloody nose. 

Laschkewitsch said he and the other members of American Coaster Enthusiasts debated on doing a relay instead. “But now we’re working on other plans,” he said. “I don’t want to divulge, but it will be tied to the actual anniversary, I can tell you that much.” 

Plenty of people have waxed poetic about the ups and downs of the Giant Dipper: It serves as a kind of allegory for the importance of taking risks, enjoying the little things and accepting changes as they come. But for Rice, whose family has overseen the attraction since as early as the 1930s, it’s a brief escape.  

“For two minutes, you just forget whatever crazy things are going on in your life, and that’s rare,” he told me as we listened to the ride whistle and grumble to life just before opening time. “I look at the entire boardwalk, and we’re constantly trying to improve, and upgrade, and add new things. This is one area where we don’t do that.” 

As noon rolls around and the Giant Dipper finally starts welcoming riders for the day, a gaggle of middle schoolers swarm the station despite the steady rainfall. Two girls slide into the seats near the very back — a coveted spot offering the best whiplash effect — and one of them instantly tightens the strings of her hoodie and tries to bury her head in her friend’s lap. 

“First time?” Rice asks, grinning knowingly. Her friend nods. 

The ride takes off, and the screams ring out into the salty air.