Shivering Timbers and Michigan's biggest amusement park

If you ride the Berry Junction Trail through northern Muskegon County, you’ll hear the screaming before you see anything. That’s Shivering Timbers — a long wooden roller coaster famous for its run of camelback hills, each one yanking you out of your seat into a few seconds of floaty weightlessness coasters fans call airtime. It’s the headliner at Michigan’s Adventure, the largest amusement park in the state.

The park didn’t start big. It grew out of a modest little attraction founded back in the 1950s and kept bolting on rides until it became what it is now: more than 60 rides, slides, and attractions, including a clutch of roller coasters. Besides Shivering Timbers there’s a suspended looping coaster that flies you upside down with your feet dangling, and a Peanuts-themed Camp Snoopy corner sized for the little ones. Your ticket also gets you into WildWater Adventure, the outdoor water park next door, so it’s effectively two parks stapled together.

It sits in northern Muskegon County, roughly between Muskegon and Whitehall, and for a big slice of West Michigan it’s simply the closest place to ride a real coaster. Generations of local kids have logged a class field trip or a last-day-of-summer here, and every June it floods the county with day-trippers and the seasonal staff who run the rides.

The best part of living nearby might be the soundtrack. On a warm afternoon you can be a couple miles off, out on the bike trail or in your backyard, and still catch the faint roar of a full train cresting the first Shivering Timbers hill — the whole county’s distant, lazy reminder that summer is here.