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I’ve never really liked shooting in portrait mode. Because of that, almost every photo I feature here ends up in landscape. Unfortunately, when I dug up some thirteen-year-old Indiana Beach pictures from my old Droid X2, I was reminded that the phone shot everything in an aggressive 16:9 format. That exaggerated aspect ratio drives me nuts! Still, the photos themselves were too fun not to share. 

Indiana Beach is a hundred years old this year. What started as Earl Spackman’s family getaway on Lake Shafer near Monticello has grown into a regional draw with seven roller coasters among forty-three rides and attractions! Unlike sprawling modern theme parks, Indiana Beach is jammed onto a narrow peninsula where every square foot counts. The result is chaotic, and the park’s tangled layout is why I fell in love with it. Here’s some of it in action: two of the park’s main draws, the Hoosier Hurricane and the Cornball Express roller coasters, share a lot of infrastructure.

This is another shot of how the Hoosier Hurricane and the Cornball Express interact. The Hurricane stands seventy-eight feet tall, where, by comparison, the measly Cornball only reaches fifty-five. While rides both feature laminated wooden track and thin rails that make a wooden roller coaster wooden, they also use a steel support structure. Because of that arrangement, roller coasters like the Hurricane and Cornball were commonly known as hybrid woodies. That definition has changed since I last went to Indiana Beach; maybe I’ll write about it one day.

Here’s the Sea Dragon, a massive swinging pirate ship built by Chance Rides and installed at the park in 1983. Known at some parks as Pharaoh’s Fury, the ride stands thirty-eight feet tall at rest but swings riders up to fifty-five feet back and forth in the air during operation. Watching it arc above the midway made it feel enormous when I was younger, especially since it was packed into the chaotic landscape of Indiana Beach.

This is the park’s Falling Star, a Chance Rides Rainbow that debuted in 1990. These rides have become surprisingly scarce in the United States, which is a shame because they’re a lot of fun. Riders sit facing outward on a horizontal platform while giant arms swing the whole thing through the air as the platform stays parallel to the ground. A lot of airtime results! I’ve always preferred the Falling Star to swinging ships like the Sea Dragon.

This photo isn’t especially good, but it’s the only one I managed to grab of Rocky’s Rapids, an Arrow log flume that splashed down at the park in 1986. Like so much at Indiana Beach, the ride squeezes itself into the available space with a kind of cheerful chaos. The course itself is pretty straightforward: boats drift out of the station into a winding tunnel, snake back the opposite direction beneath roller coaster track, disappear into another tunnel, and eventually circle toward the lift. Once your log creaks its way to the top, Rocky’s Rapids pitches riders down near the first drop of the Cornball Express.

Finally, here’s the Hoosier Hurricane’s big drop from below, along with the pier system that lets so much of the coaster stretch out over Lake Shafer. That setup is part of what makes Indiana Beach feel so different from modern theme parks: instead of endless land, the park was forced to build outward in the most creative ways. A century after Earl Spackman first opened his lakeside retreat, that barely-contained chaos is still the park’s greatest strength. Even through the awkward lens of a thirteen-year-old Droid X2, it’s hard not to see why Indiana Beach remains one of the most distinctive amusement parks in the Midwest.