Broughton Flume

When it closed on December 19, 1986, the Broughton flume was the last lumber flume working in the United States. It was never meant for whole logs. The sawmill at Willard cut big timber into rough beams, and the flume floated them nine miles and about a thousand feet down to the finishing mill at Hood in under an hour, in a trough of Douglas fir on cedar trestles. The first leg, to Drano Lake, dates from about 1913, and Broughton doubled it in 1923. It shut because the large logs it was built around had grown scarce.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bonneville Dam — 15 mi
  The first federal dam on the Columbia, where someone has counted the fish climbing its ladders every year since 1938, beside an island the Corps used as a dump for forty years.
• Rowena Crest and the Tom McCall Preserve — 17 mi
  A crest where the Ice Age floods jammed against a basalt promontory, above a plateau of mounds no one has fully explained, and a few in the parking loop that the highway department built.

More markers nearby

• Oregon Nisei Veterans WWII Memorial Highway — 6.5 mi
• Bridge of the Gods — 13 mi
• Golden Spike Ceremony — 14 mi
• Beacon Rock — 16 mi