Meanwhile, as amusement park rides developed and evolved in the early 20th century, boat and chute rides began to spring up, taking their inspiration from the fun-looking logging technology. While it was exceedingly dangerous, it was also a lot of fun. Sometimes these herders would travel down the flumes in custom-built vehicles, but more often than not, they would ride one of the logs down the path. In order to maintain the long system of chutes, and make sure they didn’t become clogged or broken, the owners would employ people known as “flume herders” to inspect the length of the transport channel, looking for potential log jams or broken portions of the flume. (Downside: this devastated the local population of redwood trees, many of which were over 2,000 years old.) Owned by the King’s River Lumber Company, the massive flume was built in a little over a year, and processed thousands of felled trees. What is thought to have been the longest log flume of all time ran 62 miles between the Sierra Nevada Mountains and a processing site in Sanger, California. Many of the original log flumes could stretch for miles, just like the tracks of a locomotive. This eliminated the need to create roads and bridges for the lumber to be transported overground. ![]() Long, usually V-shaped troughs filled with water would carry freshly cut logs over chasms and tough terrain. The first commercial log flumes were built in the mid-1800s by sawmills that used them to transport logs across long distances. Long before the log flume was an amusement park staple, log flumes were used in an industrial setting. “And it also doesn’t drown you.” The log flume is also able to be lightly or heavily themed depending on the park, which gives it a broad business appeal.Ī log flume, the not-fun kind. “The ride has a broad appeal because it has an amount of thrill to it, but it is not overwhelming for little kids and older people,” he says.
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