Lumberton Mill Flume

It’s a nothing photo that shows zero technical merit nor any mastery of composition. Label it unremarkable. Yet there’s something really cool and interesting here – if you look for it – that if seen back in the day would have had you standing in awe. Just picture it in your head and it’s amazing. At waterline, a parallel row of pilings – see them? These are the remains of a giant flume, a water slide for logs if you will, bringing timber from out there in the woods, circa 1920s-1941, into the huge BC Spruce Mills complex in Lumberton British Columbia. Near Cranbrook.

The u-shaped flume channel would be supported by trestles, some of then quite high and and would follow the lay of the land and meander this way and that down a valley, with a slight grade so as to allow good flow. Water would come from a stream at up end and logs from the field would be floated down to the saw mill in an endless procession. The sheer amount of material that went into making the flume and its support structure would have be incredible. With the closing of the Mill in the early ’40s, the fume was dismantled. Still, here and there one can fine evidence of it, including here at Palmer Bar Lake. There’s a nice back county campground a bit to the left of the photo (Palmer Bar Rec Site).

We may return to the woods here to see if we can find additional remains. I’m sure there’s more out there. Only this, it appear there’s no map where the flume ran, so it’d be shots in the dark. Still, we can make some educated guesses.

Google image search “BC Spruce Mills Lumberton log flume” and see what the flume looked like back in the day. Wow, simply wow.

In the area…
Mining under Moyie Falls.

Short Subjects: reports that for any number of reasons are brief in nature. They might be updates to older articles, previews of posts planned or not yet published, brief snippets of things that don’t fit in anywhere else or subjects that are so obscure that information on them can’t be found. Or sometimes we just ramble on about Lord knows what.

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Date of adventure: July, 2018.
Location: Near Cranbrook BC.

At waterline, footings of an old log flume.