Roller coasters in casinos! Roller coasters on towers! Roller coasters in malls!

In an effort to provide unusual and authentic thrills, companies and theme parks have devised several ways to make their rides stand out. But rarely have these scream machines used the environment around them in a ride that celebrates nature.

Enter Boulder Dash. This appropriately titled roller coaster is billed as the first built into the side of a mountain, with a track that moves along tree-lined terrain. As an enthusiast who has logged rides on more than 100 coasters nationwide, I had somehow missed this novelty — and it is practically in my own backyard, at Lake Compounce, a small, family amusement park tucked in the hills of Bristol, Conn.

Twisted tracks of steel are more my style, but Boulder Dash has many of the qualities I love in a coaster — smoothness, varied hills, speed — and does so in a setting I had never experienced before.

The ride is the signature attraction at Lake Compounce, a two-hour drive from New York City. The park mostly draws area families to its varied attractions, offering some perks not frequently seen elsewhere, like free, unlimited soda.

Lake Compounce has been loyal to its local following but wanted to create an attraction that would help put it on the map, something that would get people talking about it nationally. In the late ’90s, the park worked with engineers from the company Custom Coasters International, now defunct, to build a wooden coaster into the 900-foot rocky mountain that lines the rear of the park.

“We had to drill and core into the rock and anchor our foundations there,” said Jerry Brick, the park’s general manager. It took a year-and-a-half to construct Boulder Dash. Engineers used eight layers of Southern yellow pine to build the track. It opened in 2000.

For those waiting to board, most of the track is hidden from view. Small parts can be spotted through the trees, but part of the ride’s thrill is not knowing where you’re headed. The lift hill — the rise to the first drop — is literally up a hill and disappears into the woods, so the only way to get a true sense of where the coaster goes is by riding it.

The first drop is 115 feet, banking heavily and leading into a series of hills and curves that follow the terrain of the mountain. The view to either side is of the surrounding trees and rocks. Riders are rarely more than 10 to 12 feet from the ground, so at some points it feels as if you were on the fastest forest hayride ever. Boulder Dash reaches impressive top speeds of 65 mph, which is on a par with, and sometimes even faster than, many steel coasters.

The final part of the track pops out of the trees and runs along a road near the park’s lake. It’s the best place for nonriders to see the ride, as the train moves through a series of quick bunny hills before heading back into the station.

Wooden coasters are often criticized for their shakiness and jerkiness. As the wood wears over the years, and the track gets a little looser, riding them can be a brain-jangling experience. The park’s other wooden coaster, the Wildcat, has been around since 1927 and has all the bumps to prove it.

The wood of the Boulder Dash wasn’t immune to this, and coaster enthusiasts noticed. In 2004 Amusement Today, a trade paper for the theme park industry, ranked the Lake Compounce ride No. 1 in the world for wooden coasters. By 2007 it had dropped to No. 4. That year the coaster underwent an overhaul. The park spent $3 million on renovations, replacing about 80 percent of the track and redoing some of its supports.

Some of the ride’s elements were also reconfigured. A trick near the end, where the track is intentionally uneven, making it seem as if the cars were wobbling from side to side, was replaced with the bunny hills. In Amusement Today’s poll last year, the coaster was back up to No. 2. (The Voyage, at Holiday World in Indiana, with giant hills and five underground tunnels, was the top pick.)

It is unlikely that a steel roller coaster would need to undergo millions of dollars of renovations, raising the question of why parks continue to build coasters with wood.

“It seems like we get more ridership with wooden coasters over steel coasters,” Brick explained. “People don’t like going upside down sometimes. Some people don’t like being tossed and turned in super-high twists. So we decided to go with a wooden coaster, because we feel we can get more people on it.”

Brick also said that since the focus of Lake Compounce was really on families with preteens, a coaster everyone could ride together seemed more appealing.

Not that Boulder Dash is a walk in the park. It’s fast and spirited, with hills and drops that seem to come from nowhere. But it has a genuine playfulness to its thrills, the kind that, rather than leaving you worn and torn, makes you want to come back for more.