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).
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Map of wagon road route to Crater Lake in 1865. Map by Steve
Mark, Crater Lake National Park. |
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.).
“The August Vegetation of Mount Mazama” (Coville 1897) included
175 species, five of which were newly described: pumice sandwort (Arenaria
pumicola), Mount Mazama collomia (Collomia
mazama), Gorman’s buttercup (Ranunculus
gormanii), Crater Lake currant (Ribes
erythrocarpum), and grouseberry (Vaccinium
scoparium) (Zika 2003). This doesn’t
count the paintbrush that Applegate collected on Mount Scott, which was
originally identified as Castilleja
parviflora, but was later named C.
applegatei by M. L. Fernald of Harvard (Lang 2003).
Coville’s description reveals that generally, the vegetation has
changed little since 1897:
“The
vegetation about Crater Lake is primarily a great coniferous forest. Most of the
mountain slopes are covered by a dense growth of trees….The forests are rather
dry and have almost no underbrush, not enough to impede a foot-traveler. The
commonest shrub is Ribes erythrocarpum and the most abundant plant
Juncus glabratum [Luzula hitchcockii]….
On the gentle outer slopes of the crater occur long stretches of open land
entirely devoid of trees and evidently covered until late in the spring with
snow.”
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.
