Catch "Flume Fever" and learn about a rare piece of Colorado history

Hanging Flume near Uravan, Colorado (photo by Ealdgyth)

"Flume Fever" is a great little five-minute documentary about the coming together of a beautiful corner of
southwest Colorado with a unique piece of Western history.

In the late 1800s, hungering for imagined millions in gold in the Dolores River, miners built an amazing hanging flume to carry water from the San Miguel River to work the placer deposit in the Dolores Canyon. The wooden waterway was hung from the sheer sandstone facade of the San Miguel Canyon, in a completely ingenious -- and almost befuddling -- distinctly regional feat of engineering.

This short film captures the novelty of the Hanging Flume of the San Miguel through a group who put their "flume fever" to use unraveling how to reconstruct a 48-foot section of the flume to get a "glimpse of the level of the effort that went into the construction" of the structure in the first place, says one of the team.

Check out the video. Then go check out the place.



Flume Fever from Mara Ferris on Vimeo.