Riding the Flume: The Most Dangerous Fun Boulder Creek Ever Invented

For ten years Boulder Creek had a water slide to Felton, and the town could not resist it.

The San Lorenzo Valley flume was built to move lumber: a V-shaped wooden trough on trestles, nine miles of moving water from a headworks two miles north of town down to the railhead at Felton. It did that job from 1875 until the mid-1880s, and our flume history tells that story. This is the other story, the one about what people did with a nine-mile ribbon of fast water running through their valley: they rode it.

The boats

Almost as soon as the flume opened, riding it in makeshift boats became a local pastime. Lisa Robinson's history of the flume for the San Lorenzo Valley Museum reproduces a photograph of a rider seated in one of these little craft, her companion standing on the walkway beside her in a derby hat, starched shirt, and three-piece suit. Nobody dressed down for it. A flume ride was an occasion.

The flume company itself used the water the same way. When its mill camp moved, the crew loaded tents, mattresses, bunks, and blankets into boxes and floated the whole camp downstream. Charles Brimblecom, whose 1875 diary is one of the few day-by-day records of the flume era, watched it happen that May and noted the crew got their boxes too close together, dammed up the water, and nearly stranded their own household goods. He wasn't too worried to enjoy it: "After a while the stove came down in fine style though I did not see that."

Riding wasn't simple even when it worked. At two places, road bridges crossed the flume low enough that a rider couldn't pass under them. The move, Robinson records, was to jump out of the boat, sprint across the bridge, and jump back into the moving boat on the far side. There's no record of how often that maneuver failed, which is probably for the best.

The plank walkers

The flume's official foot traffic was the flume walkers, men employed to patrol the line with a stick and break up lumber jams. The V-shape did some of the work on its own, since water backing up behind a jam rose and lifted the boards free, but the walkers were the insurance. The walkway they patrolled was a plank about ten inches wide, sometimes running along trestlework high above the canyon floor.

In winter the walkers had company they never asked for. The valley's roads churned into knee-deep mud, and ordinary people walking between Boulder Creek and Felton found the flume's ten-inch plank preferable to the road. Brimblecom did it himself and recorded how close it came to going wrong. Crossing high trestlework one wet December Sunday in 1875, he watched his companion nearly go over the edge: "quick as a flash, Harmon's foot slipped and he went down on his knees partly on and partly off the flume," the diary reads. The man caught himself between the board and the trough. They took the road after that.

What it cost

Not everyone caught themselves. A month later Brimblecom recorded a man killed falling from the flume near Felton, whom the Sentinel identified as James Nichols, fallen between two spots the paper called "Hick's crossing" and "French John's." In March 1876 the flume lost one of its own superintendents, Thomas Lilley of San Jose, who fell roughly 95 feet from a high section south of Ben Lomond and didn't survive it. The Santa Cruz Sentinel ran what amounts to an early workplace-safety editorial: "a walk ten inches wide, without railing or guard, over trestle-work ninety feet high, is not just the thing for its employees to be compelled to cross over daily."

The flume kept collecting close calls for as long as it stood. In 1880 a fourteen-year-old boy walking the plank with his gun as a walking stick shot himself when it slipped, and was at first reported dead before word came he might recover. In 1883 a twelve-year-old fell fifty feet and, somehow, walked away from it.

The men who knew it best

The walkers themselves are mostly anonymous, but Robinson's research names a few. Scott Taylor served as flume foreman. Robert Cowen, a Scot who spent more than forty years as a lumberman, walked the line. And William H. Dool, Billy to the valley, went from patrolling the flume's planks to serving as a warden at Big Basin after it became California's first state park, which means at least one man spent his working life keeping people safe around both of the valley's great redwood enterprises, the one that cut the trees down and the one that saved them.

Why there's nothing left to ride

The flume's working life ended in stages. The stretch from Lorenzo down to Felton sent its last load in May 1885 and came apart as the railroad advanced up the valley. The stretch north of town kept floating lumber for the upper mills until early 1888. The redwood planks were pulled apart and reused in local construction, so the flume didn't vanish so much as dissolve into the valley's buildings. Our flume history covers the full arc, and the history timeline places it among everything else the 1880s threw at this town.

The riding, it's fair to assume, stopped when the water did.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did people really ride the lumber flume?

Yes. Riding the flume in makeshift boats became a popular pastime almost as soon as it opened in 1875, documented in photographs the San Lorenzo Valley Museum holds.

How dangerous was it?

Genuinely dangerous. Contemporary records name two deaths connected to the flume in 1876 alone, one rider and one superintendent, plus serious injuries to two boys in the early 1880s.

What was a flume walker?

An employee who patrolled the flume on a ten-inch-wide plank, carrying a stick to break up lumber jams. In winter, ordinary travelers used the same planks to avoid muddy roads, which the flume company never intended.

Where did the flume run?

Nine miles, from a headworks about two miles north of Boulder Creek down the San Lorenzo Valley to the railhead at Felton, crossing the river a half dozen times on the way.

Can I see any of it today?

No section of the flume survives in place. Its lumber was reused in valley buildings after dismantling. The San Lorenzo Valley Museum keeps photographs and the research that this article draws on.

Last reviewed August 7, 2026. Drawn from Lisa Robinson's The San Lorenzo Valley Flume (San Lorenzo Valley Museum, 3rd edition, 2025), including her reproductions of Charles Brimblecom's 1875-76 diary and contemporary Santa Cruz Sentinel reporting. Billy Dool's flume-walking years and later Big Basin wardenship are independently confirmed by the county's historic-resources survey of his Boulder Creek residence.

For the industrial side of the story, see the San Lorenzo Valley flume and Boulder Creek's logging history. For everything else that's on, see our events calendar. Browse the business directory. Something out of date? Tell us.