The Botanists at Crater Lake National Park

Elizabeth L. Horn

Even before it became a National Park, Crater Lake attracted botanists and amateur plant enthusiasts. Early botanical explorations may have been inspired by William Gladstone Steel (1854-1934), who is often called the founder of Crater Lake National Park. As a teenager, Steel moved with his family from Kansas to Portland, Oregon. In 1894, he founded the Mazamas (an intrepid group of Portland mountaineers), who held their annual summer encampment at Crater Lake two years later. Steel invited numerous dignitaries and members of the scientific community, undoubtedly to enlist support for national park status for Crater Lake.

Hart Merriam, Chief U.S. Biological Survey, in lead on horseback, followed by his assistant Vernon Bailey on horseback at Crater Lake in August 1896. Photo courtesy of Crater Lake National Park.

Among the invited groups was the National Forest Commission, responsible for making recommendations for legislation and management of public lands known as the Forest Reserves. Steele met them in Medford, Oregon, and traveled to Crater Lake with them to the 1896 Mazama meeting. The group included Gifford Pinchot (later to become first Chief of the Forest Service), Dr. Charles S. Sargent (Director of the Arnold Arboretum, Harvard University), and John Muir (champion of Yosemite which became a national park in 1890) (Applegate 1939). Even though inclement weather ended their camping trip after only one night, Pinchot was awed by the natural beauty and later helped Steel have Crater Lake designated a national park (S. Mark, pers. comm.).

Early Exploration and Discoveries of New Species

Map of wagon road route to Crater Lake in 1865. Map by Steve Mark, Crater Lake National Park.

Steel also invited a party from the Department of Agriculture, including Dr. Frederick V. Coville, Chief Botanist, and John B. Leiberg, who were investigating the plains vegetation of southeastern Oregon at the time. They reached the Crater Lake rim on August 13 from Fort Klamath via Anna (Annie) Creek (Coville 1897). Other members of this group were Dr. C. Hart Merriam, Chief of the U.S. Biological Survey, and his assistants Vernon Bailey, Edward Prebble, and Cleveland Allen (Applegate 1939). Merriam was working on his Life Zone classifications, which were later widely used throughout the mountainous West. Elmer I. Applegate, who had been corresponding with Coville, also joined the Crater Lake expedition (Lang 2003).

Coville’s party camped on the rim of Crater Lake for a week, collecting plants from Llao Rock, the Watchman, Castle Crest, and Mount Scott as well as from Pole Bridge Creek, Vidae Cliff, and Red Cone. Coville even descended the trail down the caldera wall to a boat landing and visited Wizard Island (Coville 1897). Applegate and his brother Fred explored Mount Scott and provided Coville with a list of 22 specimens collected on the summit as well as additional species from the southern flank. Coville also received specimens from Mazama member/Oregon botanist Martin W. Gorman, who had made collecting trips to Crater Lake in the 1880s and again in 1896 (Bornholdt, pers. comm.).

Crater Lake currant (Ribes erythrocarpum) is a narrow endemic found only in a few Oregon counties and was first collected by Coville and Leiberg in 1896. It is an intermediate host for the blister rust on whitebark pine. Photo by Norm Jensen.

Coville’s description reveals that generally, the vegetation has changed little since 1897:

F. Lyle Wynd high school graduation photograph, 1923, from Eugene High School Yearbook. Courtesy of Lane County Historical Museum, Eugene, OR.

What has changed is public access and botanical collection. In the 1890s, botanical collection at Crater Lake was difficult: it took three days by wagon or horseback to travel from Ashland or Jacksonville, and about the same amount of time from Linkville [Klamath Falls] (Applegate 1939), via an 1865 military road that the Army built to carry supplies from the Rogue Valley to its post at Fort Klamath. This road followed much the same route as present day Highway 62, staying above and south of Annie Creek and Castle Creek Canyons. From the military road, a tourist group from Jacksonville blazed a two-mile track from the Army road up Dutton Creek to the rim of Crater Lake (Mark 1997). After national park status was achieved in 1902, road improvements followed, as did the botanists. Now over 500,000 people visit the park every year, and plant collection may only be done by permit.

Early Interpreters and a Park Flora

Three botanists who served on the park staff during the 1920s and 1930s, F. Lyle Wynd, Lincoln Constance, and Elmer Applegate, shaped the early botanical heritage of Crater Lake National Park, including the first floras of the Park, the concept of life zones, and informative articles published in Nature Notes (www.nps.gov/crla/notes).

Wynd (1904-1987) spent his youth at Fort Klamath, only ten miles from the Park’s boundary and became enthralled with Crater Lake. He was only 18 when he started working there as a ranger naturalist (Love 2002). Between 1923 and 1930 he collected extensively, and six years later he published the first “Flora of Crater Lake National Park” (Wynd 1936), which listed 433 species (Zika 2003). He personally collected all but three of the listed specimens, indicating his intimacy with the Park’s flora. His specimens became part of the University of Oregon Herbarium (now housed at Oregon State University).

Herbarium sheet of Wynd’s holotype for Ranunculus terrestris collected at Red Blanket Creek, CLNP. Lyman Benson annotated the specimen as Ranunulus gormanii Greene in 1932.

Constance (1909-2001), a fellow student of Wynd under the enthusiastic direction of Louis F. Henderson at the University of Oregon (Love 2000), worked as a seasonal naturalist at Crater Lake in 1931 and 1932 (Ertter 2001). In addition to continuing work begun by Wynd, Constance wrote Nature Notes, in which he described several park wildflower displays, including those at Castle Crest. His whimsical bent was revealed by an article entitled “Flowers, Where the Scene-shifter–Nature–Is Always Busy” (Constance 1931). His more serious side was displayed when he advocated Crater Lake National Park as an ideal place for scientific study, arguing that the geologic beauty of the park is not more important than the “manifold fields for scientific investigation which it offers” (Constance 1932). While at Crater Lake Constance kept a few labeled specimens for visitors to identify and regularly led Rim caravans. Although one of his assignments while a seasonal employee was to compile a flora checklist, other chores prevented him from completing the list (S. Mark, pers. comm.).

Applegate (1867-1949) worked as a Park Ranger (naturalist) from 1934 to 1939, starting when he was 67 years old! A native of southern Oregon, Applegate first visited Crater Lake as a ten year-old boy. Since he began collecting and studying plants at an early age (Lang 2003), it is not surprising that he was involved with the 1896 Coville and Merriam expedition. That experience led to a job as field assistant for Coville as he collected in the Oregon Cascades (including Crater Lake) in the summers of 1897 and 1898. Applegate capably managed the pack animals as well as camping and plant collecting chores (Lang 2003). During the 1897 season, they discovered pumice grape fern or moonwort (Botrychium pumicola) (Applegate 1939). Applegate’s checklist of the flora of Crater Lake National Park listed 564 species (Applegate 1939) and was published ten years before he died at the age of 82. In his flora he acknowledged Wynd’s earlier work as well as that of Coville and Merriam. Most of Applegate’s collections are housed in the CLNP herbarium.

Lean Years and Re-vitalized Botany

Mahala mat (Ceanothus prostratus) and snowbrush (Ceanothus velutinus) illustrated by Charles Yocom. Reprinted from Shrubs of Crater Lake National Park.

Park budgets declined during the 1930 Depression years and World War II (1940s). Many plans, projects, and programs were postponed for lack of funding and staff (Mark 1990). An increase in activity came with the 1950s.

One notable effort in the 1950s was the work by Charles Yocom (1914-1985), a seasonal naturalist in 1951 and 1952. A skilled illustrator who learned his trade drawing plants used by waterfowl, he developed an interest in the Park’s shrubs. He left an illustrated manuscript with the Park which was later published by the Crater Lake Natural History Association (Yocom 1964). He went on to illustrate other popular publications and became a professor of wildlife at Humboldt State College (N. Simmons, pers. comm.).

Interest in botanical exploration within the Park got a boost with Richard M. Brown (1926-1998), who began his career at Crater Lake as a seasonal naturalist in 1952. He then became Assistant Park Naturalist (1953-1960), Chief of Interpretation (1963-1966), and Research Biologist (1967-1970). He held a Masters from Harvard and put his training in plant taxonomy to good use by adding to the Park herbarium. He also recruited energetic, skilled seasonal naturalists and encouraged them to pursue research within the Park. He helped create a library in the Park, which was dedicated as part of the CLNP centennial celebration in 2002 as the Richard McPike Brown Memorial Library.

Curtis of Chico State College was a seasonal naturalist in 1966 and 1967. During that time he pursued his interest in slime molds and collected within the Park, finding eight species new to Oregon (Curtis 1969).

Charles Yocom’s illustration of Crater Lake currant (Ribes erythrocarpum). Reprinted from Shrubs of Crater Lake National Park with permission from the Crater Lake Natural History Association.

Horn of Purdue University was a seasonal naturalist in 1964 and 1965. Richard Brown encouraged her to study the Pumice Desert, a five square mile dry meadow in the northern portion of the Park. Horn spent lieu days (off-duty time) on the desert and many other seasonal employees assisted with field work. The study showed only 14 species of plants inhabited the area and covered less than 5% of the surface (Horn 1968). Subsequent monitoring showed that succession is slowly proceeding: in one plot, lodgepole pine numbers increased 75% over 35 years (Horn 2002).

The Role of Fire

During the 1970s and 1980s emphasis shifted to the study of fire ecology at Crater Lake National Park. Much of this work was done cooperatively through partnerships with Oregon State University and the University of Washington. Forest ecologists looked at fire regimes and wondered if it was possible to return portions of the Park landscape to pre-settlement vegetation patterns.

Pumice slope west of Llao Rock, with Hillman Peak in the background. Foreground vegetation is primarily spreading phlox (Phlox diffusa) and Newberry knotweed (Polygonum newberryi). Photo by E. Horn.

Zobel of Oregon State University looked at vegetation patterns during the mid-1970s, documenting fire history as background for initiating a prescribed fire program. He focused work on the southeast corner of the Park known as the panhandle. Graduate student Robert McNeil examined vegetation patterns and fire history of an Abies concolor-Pinus ponderosa forest inside the southern boundary of the Park. Zobel and McNeil correlated the vegetation with fire frequency, noting that the occurrence of a widespread fire appeared to reduce the size and intensity of fires occurring in the same area for the next ten years. They also noted changes in forest composition that may have resulted from the exclusion of fire (McNeil and Zobel 1980). Another graduate student Robert Zigler did similar studies on Pinus contorta forests within the Park (D. Zobel, pers. comm.).

Ponderosa pine forest with understory of snowbush (Ceanothus velutinus) and sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) found in the southeast and northeast corners of CLNP. Photo by E. Horn.

Agee has studied fire within CLNP since the mid-1970s. He first visited Crater Lake while working for the National Park Service in San Francisco, where he was involved in fire regime studies in the Sierra Nevada. Crater Lake administrators had seen prescribed fire used in the Sierra Nevada and wanted to know what techniques could be applied at CLNP to restore historic forest systems. When Agee transferred to the Seattle NPS office as an ecological and research biologist, CLNP became part of his responsibilities. He directed graduate student and seasonal employee Terri Thomas’ study of the effects of fires on woody debris accumulation (Thomas and Agee 1986). Another graduate student, Christopher Chappell, studied the reburning of Abies magnifica forests when a fire was allowed to burn in 1980 around Crater Peak (Chappell and Agee 1996). The summer of 1988 was a turning point for natural fire on federal lands. At Crater Lake, managers were letting the Prophecy Fire near Mount Scott burn as a natural fire when it blew eastward out of the Park. The Yellowtone fires of the same year prompted the suspension for many years of federal plans to allow natural fires to burn when prescribed conditions were met. In 1988 Agee became chair of the Division of Forest Resources Management at the University of Washington. He continues, with cooperators, to study the effects of prescribed fire throughout the Pacific Northwest, including the effects of timing (spring or fall) of prescribed fires and insect infestation on tree mortality in CLNP (J. Agee, pers. comm.).

Current Crater Lake Botanists

Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) forest in Munson Valley. Photo by E. Horn.

The historical plant lists compiled by Wynd and Applegate were recently updated and expanded by Peter F. Zika, who began park survey work through the Oregon Natural Heritage Program during the summers of 1994 and 1995 (P. Zika, pers. comm.). Additional field work and examination of herbarium specimens led to “A Crater Lake National Park Vascular Plant Checklist.” Published through the Crater Lake Natural History Association, Zika’s list documents 682 species, including locations. The publication lists the narrow endemics of Crater Lake and the Park’s immediate surroundings, including Botrychium pumicola, Collomia mazama, and Ribes erythrocarpum. Other southern Oregon endemics found in the Park include Arenaria pumicola, Castilleja applegatei ssp. applegatei, and Polygonum cascadense. Species that have not been seen since early collections are noted, providing botanists the opportunity to search for them (Zika 2003).

Michael Murray

Terrestrial ecologist Michael Murray oversees the current botany program at Crater Lake. Having studied fire-dependent ecosystems in diverse locales such as Redwood National Park, Alaska, and the northern Rocky Mountains, Murray monitors fire effects at CLNP, as well as coordinates programs for revegetation, exotic species, and whitebark pine restoration. The fire monitoring program involves inventorying “preburn” vegetation in anticipation of natural fires to provide a baseline for comparison after a fire occurs. Murray also coordinates the cooperative fire regime studies with researchers at the University of Washington, Oregon State University, and Portland State University. For a description of his whitebark pine ecosystem studies, see Murray’s article on page 25.

Mark Buktenica

Mark Buktenica, CLNP’s aquatic biologist since 1985, researches moss in Crater Lake. Aquatic moss rings the lake to a depth of about 100 to 450 feet. Earlier evaluations of the extent of the moss and its associated epiphytes and invertebrates indicated the biomass of the moss could dwarf any other biological component in the lake. That would make it a significant player in the lake’s nutrient dynamics (Buktenica 1996). A remote-operated submersible robot will be used during the summer of 2005 to further evaluate the moss beds and their associated aquatic life. (M. Buktenica, pers. comm.).

Steve Jessup

Mountain hemlock (Tsuga mertensiana) and whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) along Garfield Peak Trail. Photo by E. Horn.

Crater Lake National Park is well known for its geological gem, the deep blue lake. It is less well known for its botanical treasures. Early botanists had the pleasure of exploring, identifying, and characterizing its species and plant communities. Although CLNP is relatively small by national park standards (about 250 square miles), it teems with a diverse flora. Ranging from 4,000 feet in elevation in the southwest corner to the nearly 9,000 foot Mount Scott along the eastern rim of the lake, CLNP straddles the Cascade crest with plant communities representing both the western and eastern slopes. Much of the lake’s rim holds snow well into the summer and water flows through porous lava to create spectacular wildflower displays in the dry forest. Current botanical programs, built on knowledge accumulated by the park’s earlier botanists, emphasize preservation and ecology: whitebark pine, plant associations, succession, and fire ecology. CLNP is an ideal outdoor laboratory in a breathtakingly awesome setting. A magical place to botanize–that’s Crater Lake National Park.

Acknowledgments

Michael Murray, Mark Buktenica, Steve Mark, and Wendy Coleman at Crater Lake National Park graciously provided information on CLNP programs. Ned Simmons provided information on Charles Yocom. Mariana Bornholdt provided information about Gorman. Rhoda Love, Steve Mark, and Norm Jensen were invaluable in helping gather photos to illustrate the article and provided helpful information. Kenton Chambers, Aaron Liston, and Rena Schlachter, of the Oregon State University Herbarium provided information and a photo of Wynd’s holotype herbarium sheet.

References

Applegate EI. 1939. The Plants of Crater Lake National Park. American Midland Naturalist 22(2):225-314.

Buktenica M. 1996. Why enter a sleeping volcano in a submarine? Nature Notes 27: 12-18.

Chappell CB, Agee JK. 1996. Fire Severity and Tree Seedling Establishment in Abies magnifica Forests, Southern Cascades, Oregon. Ecological Applications 6:628-640.

Coville FV. 1897. The August vegetation of Mount Mazama. Mazama 1(2):170-203.

Constance L. 1931. Flowers, Where The Scene-shifter–Nature–Is Always Busy. Nature Notes, Vol. 4(1):9-10.

Constance L. 1932. Crater Lake National Park as a Field for Scientific Research. Oregon Education Journal, pp 5, 27-28.

Curtis D. 1969. New Records of Myxomycetes from Oregon. Madroño 20:75-77.

Ertter B. 2001. Memories of Lincoln. Fremontia 29(2):13-22.

Horn EM. 1968. Ecology of the Pumice Desert. Northwest Science 42:141-149.

Horn EL. 2002. The Pumice Desert, Crater Lake National Park. Kalmiopsis 9:11-15.

Jackson MT, Faller A. 1973. Structural Analysis and Dynamics of the plant Communities of Wizard Island, Crater Lake National Park. Ecological Monographs 43:441-461.

Jackson MT. 1973. A Floristic Survey of Wizard Island, Crater Lake National Park. The Wasmann Journal of Biology 31:313-322.

Lang FA. 2003. Elmer Ivan Applegate (1867-1949): The Erythronium Man. Kalmiopsis 10:1-10.

Love RM. 2000. The Grand Old Man of Northwest Botany: Louis F. Henderson (1853-1942). Pacific Northwest Quarterly 91(4):183-199.

Love RM. 2002. Frederick Lyle Wynd (1904-1987) Pioneering Botanist at Crater Lake National Park. Bulletin of the Native Plant Society of Oregon 35(8):94.

Mark S. 1990. Administrative History of Crater Lake National Park. http://www.nps.gov/crla/adhi/adhi16.htm

Mark S. 1997. On an Old Road to Crater Lake. Nature Notes 28:16-19.

Mark S. 2000. Research Natural Areas. Nature Notes 31: 13-16.

McNeil RC, Zobel DB. 1980. Vegetation and Fire History of a Ponderosa Pine-White Fir Forest in Crater Lake National Park. Northwest Science 54:30-46.

Murray MP, Rasmussen MC. 2003. Non-native Blister Rust Disease on Whitebark Pine at Crater Lake National Park. Northwest Science 77:87-91.

Pinchot G. 1947. Breaking New Ground. Washington (DC): Island Press.

Thomas TL, Agee JK. 1986. Prescribed fire effects on mixed conifer forest structure at Crater Lake, Oregon. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 16: 1082-1087.

Wynd FL. 1936. The Flora of Crater Lake National Park. American Midland Naturalist 17:881-949.

Wynd FL. 1941. The Botanical Features of the Life Zones of Crater Lake National Park. American Midland Naturalist 25:324-347.

Yocom CF. 1964. Shrubs of Crater Lake. Crater Lake (OR): Crater Lake Natural History Association.

Zika PF. 2003. A Crater Lake National Park Vascular Plant Checklist. Crater Lake (OR): Crater Lake Natural History Association.

Elizabeth L. Horn began her love affair with Crater Lake National Park while a seasonal naturalist and did graduate work there leading to a MS from Purdue University (1966). She has published several popular wildflower guides covering the Oregon coast and the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountains. She retired from the US Forest Service and lives in West Yellowstone, Montana, but returns to Crater Lake often to monitor her plots in the Pumice Desert.