CHAPTER TWELVE: Resource Management: 1916-Present C. RESOURCE MANAGEMENT: 1940s

Fish Liberations in Crater Lake
1910-1945

Year Rainbow
Trout
Brown
Trout
Silver Salmon
(Silversides)
Cutthroat
Trout
Steelhead

1910 50,000
1914 2,000 15,000 20,000
1922 25,000 3,500
1923 14,000 11,000
1924 24,000
1925 22,500
1926
1927 46,800
1928 64,000
1929
1930 3,000 7,500
1931 98,000
1932 156,000 163,000
1933 200,000 150,000
1934 54,000
1935 100,000 20,000
1936 25,000 25,000
1937 100,000 50,000
1938
1939 100,000
1940 85,820
1941 20,000

Old Naturalist Files, Crater Lake National Park.

Protection of park forests against forest fires was one of the principal concerns of park management during the war. The park fire protection program was divided into three categories for management purposes: prevention, presuppression, and suppression. Prevention included public control and education and fire hazard reduction. Presuppression comprised organized personnel training, acquisition of fire equipment, and physical improvements. The latter included protection motorways, fire, horse, and foot trails, and fire breaks; lookout stations on the Watchman and Mount Scott; four ranger stations at the north entrance, Annie Spring, Lost Creek, and park headquarters; five patrol cabins at National, Bybee, Red Blanket, and Bear creeks and Maklak Spring, a radio and telephone communication system; and fire toolboxes and caches. Suppression of fire was to be accomplished primarily by trained park personnel employing hand tools. Cooperative fire fighting agreements were in force with all adjoining forest protection agencies. To strengthen the park’s fire-fighting capability a detailed Memorandum of Understanding between the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture for mutual aid in fire control was approved in January 1943. [39]

By the early 1940s a soil and moisture conservation program had been initiated at Crater Lake. The program, as described in November 1944, had two principal objectives for resource management:

1. To stop erosion on slopes, cuts, fills, embankments, borrow pits and quarry sites, and to promote growth of grasses, plants, shrubs, bushes and trees on all such areas where vegetation is now lacking, in order to restore these slopes to a more pleasing and natural condition and at the same time materially reduce the present heavy annual maintenance costs of removing eroded material.

2. To stop erosion of Crater Walls at developed or improved areas in an effort to preserve and protect the rim of the crater and save trees, bushes, shrubs, plants, and grassed areas from destruction. To prevent erosion of the soil on which improvements exist, viz, sidewalks, parapet walls, buildings, landscape planting, etc. [40]