During William Steel’s superintendency, visitation of 6,000 persons a year was considered remarkable. Traffic consisted mainly of horsedrawn vehicles until around 1916. Regulations issued by the National Park Service in 1913, in addition to setting specific hours for travel by cars and restricting the speed limit to six miles an hour, suggested that motorists carry a good hatchet, crowbar, and shovel, and one hundred feet of rope, along with pulley blocks, plus a piece of board on which to brace a jack. Also handy for extricating cars from deep sand was a roll of chicken wire. Other essentials were extra oil, extra gas, and plenty of water. [25]
In 1913 a temporary road was constructed from Kirk, north of Chiloquin, to the park boundary near Wheeler Creek. The War Department maintained two construction camps at the park and during this year
completed the grading and proper drainage of a road from a point on the park boundary near San[d] Creek, within the canyon of which are hundreds of fine pinnacles, along this stream to the rim of the lake at Kerr Notch, the lowest point in the walls of the lake, a distance of six and one-half miles [Pinnacles Road]. Eight miles west of this is the old road connecting Park Headquarters with the lake, an [on] which considerable work has been done. The last mile of the latter road has heretofore been the bane of automobile drivers, as it had a maximum grade of 33 per cent. This has, however, been forever eliminated by a new road of 10 per cent maximum. [26]
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